Aside from all being hosted on the same server, well, DiG says the PTR is for 'mail.fourguysfromtampa.com' and that the nameservers belong to Datapipe. So she's got one IIS system hosting multiple copies of the same crap, never asked her hosting company / DNS holder to update the PTRs, and hasn't made any effort to customize her 404 pages. Your point being? (I kid).
I'm actually a little surprised she didn't invoke John Dozier to protect her precious IP claims...
I haven't really watched it much in the past few years (I think season 11 was the last one I saw?), but I imagine Iron Chef America is keeping him a little busy.
But as for his books, oh hell yes. Some of them include generic methods that are far more valuable than specific recipes. Kinda like known the SMTP protocol instead of just being able to configure Sendmail...
That's not a problem I've ever had either, and the ticketing system we use at work is (unfortunately) flash-based. I've left Firefox open with 5-10 tabs, including the ticket system, for weeks at a time without it crashing. Granted, this is with the newest flash on Windows 7 x32, so YMMV. At home I don't typically leave Firefox open longer than when I'm using it, but that usually spans four to five hours with multiple tabs as well, though there I tend to avoid the flash sites out of principle. One notable exception is that my wife watches YouTube for hours on end, and the worst that happens there is high memory usage.
Undoubtedly. Also, forget not that ICP / Psychopath Records has a huge marketing thing (and their own YouTube channel) where they sell literally hundreds, if not thousands, of ICP-related crap products to the Juggalo crowd. It's all about the money, and nothing more. If their fans could be educated to the point that they saw that, well, ICP would be out of a career.
Re:Preparing to jump, who is with me?
on
Fedora 13 Is Out
·
· Score: 1
The install finished relatively painlessly after about 30 minutes last night, and it's working like a champ. Unlike Ubuntu 9.10, Fedora 13 found my wireless card and the correct resolution for my monitor right away. The only things I can say are 'worse' about it are that 1) MySQL-server is installed by default (and I can't remove it without taking the desktop with it for some reason), and 2) installing the MP3 codecs on Ubuntu was a bit easier.
Now, with regards to point 1... I like MySQL - I really do - I just don't need it on my laptop. Well, the client is nice to have, but the server is overkill. For number two all I had to do was enable the FreshRPM repos and everything else took care of itself.
Will kick it around for another couple of weeks before deciding whether or not to put it on my main system. For what it's worth I used the 32-bit build instead of the 64-bit one.
Re:Preparing to jump, who is with me?
on
Fedora 13 Is Out
·
· Score: 1
Indeed I am. With the changes that are being proposed for 10.10, I'm not too happy with the Canonical people anymore. I'm sure this install won't be a breeze, but only time will tell. The biggest problem I have on my laptop is the widescreen wasn't recognized by X in a friendly manner (I worked around that, however, with a few tweaks to xorg.conf). Though I won't be putting fedora on my main rig - I'm thinking CentOS for that and Fedora for the laptop.
I'm also getting pissed at dolphin either. the old konqueror browser|file manager was pretty decent. dolphin OTOH plain sucks, from the way it displays stuff in detailed view, the impossibility of reordering the columns, how the tree view pane keeps moving the directory tree left and right by itself. again, any sugestions of a replacement that looks/feels more like the old konqueror will welcome.
Right click on a folder, go into properties, click on the wrench & screwdriver icon (settings?), and remove Dolphin from the list of apps to open folders with. Move Konqueror up to the top of the list. Click 'okay' and wait for the system to update the configuration. Done.
Ah... That game brings back some serious memories. That was the game my senior year in college...
To this day I'm glad Square had the balls to actually do a state-side release. They were too worried that the religious themes would scare off customers / annoy the religious nutters.
Unfortunately, I can't really play it anymore. The graphics were sub-par even when it was released, and now they're almost unwatchable. Though it did have one of the greatest soundtracks I've ever heard in a game. If only they hadn't made the prequels such a mess...
Pennsylvania is riddled with old mines, both from limestone and coal excavation. It's relatively cheap to purchase 'waste' space that another company excavated fifty to seventy years ago.
Also, I'm a little remiss that I never knew this existed. I grew up one county over from Butler County and would have loved to have toured a facility like this. Then again, it probably didn't exist in its present state when I was growing up...
You didn't mention which XBox game, so I'll have to take your word for it. "Team Twinny" should be purged because pages that exist solely as self-promotion and provide no encyclopaedic content are against Wikipedia's rules. Here are their criteria for speedy deletion. Criteria G10 states:
Unambiguous advertising or promotion.
Pages that are exclusively promotional, and would need to be fundamentally rewritten to become encyclopedic. Note that simply having a company or product as its subject does not qualify an article for this criterion.
In the "Team Twinny" article, that's exactly the case. There was another similar article for a deli in London that met an identical fate: all the article had was the street address, phone number, and a marketing blurb about what they sell. Had there been a history of the store, or perhaps something else other than just stating 'this is where we are and what we sell' it might have made the cut.
I just spent the last fifteen to twenty minutes perusing the Special:NewPages, and it's terrifying. For every actual encyclopaedic or even semi-valid article, there seem to be a handful of pages that are pure garbage. There are "articles" about fictitious bands, self-promotion, slander, and things that really don't matter. On top of that, many of the new submissions seem to be very poorly written from a grammatical point of view. They're not quite as bad as the average YouTube comment, but they're close. If I was in charge over there, I'd be deleting things left and right as well.
There are probably a number of reasons for the lack of quality, but certainly the ability for anyone to contribute has got to be a big part. Is there an easy fix? No, probably not. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the barriers to approval are lop-sided, so raising them won't necessarily help. It's not like potential users will put up with taking a written exam just to be able to edit a single page...
I would suggest using privilege escalation to grant users more power and control based on how long they've been members and require that when people create accounts, they specify a number of areas that they possess knowledge of. Say I create a new account. When a user creates a login, he has to pick five to ten topics that he thinks he's qualified to write about (and these can be fairly broad, otherwise we'd have far too many checkboxes). He can't make any changes or contributions for a week (to prevent people from signing up just to vandalize articles) and can only lurk and learn the rules. Then, after that time period is up, he's allowed to only make changes to existing articles in his self-proclaimed fields. If he makes enough good and accepted changes, then allow him to start writing new articles in his self-proclaimed fields. Finally, after a period of time has passed where he's acknowledged as knowing what he's talking about and not a jerk who does things for the lulz, let him make changes/create articles anywhere.
One thing I would love to see done more than anything else, however, is the clear separation of fiction and non-fiction, by at least a subdomain, if not an entirely different FQDN. Star Wars as a film and a cultural institution in America? That goes in Wikipedia as non-fiction. Luke Skywalker as a person? That's in-universe and belongs in Wookiepedia, or at least in the fiction section. A biography of Luke doesn't belong in the same encyclopaedia as one about Louis Pasteur, plain and simple.
What I find even crazier is that most Germans I've talked to agree with this speech law. I suppose Germans don't value free speech as much as the Americans.
I'm going to Godwin this, but only because it's true...
IIRC, it's not that Germans don't value the freedom of expression, but rather that they're still suffering from a pretty bad case of what we'd term 'pendulum swing'. You see, after World War II ended, they got a little touchy about people being able to openly spew hateful and hurtful speeches. They clamped down pretty hard on peoples' ability to say what they want, though not directly through legislation, and it never really let up. To this day the Germans still remember what happened to them as a nation the last time bullying, lying, and insulting others went unchecked - they started a war that involved a fairly large number of countries and ended up with them losing and, essentially, being split in two. So, as a result, the older generation, and even the current on (albeit to a lesser extent) is really strict about policing itself.
Penny Arcade's 'Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory' also comes into play here... When hiding behind a screen of semi-anonymity, people with an audience will say and do just about anything to get a rise out of others. This is, unfortunately, part of human nature.
Given that, it's not difficult to see why they're overly sensitive about what people do and say on-line. They're trying, in their own misguided and ill-conceived way, to put the same sort of self-policing mechanism in place on the web that they use in real-life. But since they have to deal with an enormous number of outside influences (read: every site on the internet that doesn't originate in Germany), they have to use the club of law instead of the softer form of social pressure that works when people are standing around talking in the town square. Unfortunately for them, the 'net and the town square aren't the same thing and certainly don't work the same way.
Or, to summarize; this law, though probably poorly-written, is conceived with good intentions, though we all know how that goes.
It wasn't by choice. The laptop was crufty (and had Vista on it) when I got it, so I wiped & reinstalled to get rid of the things previous employees had left behind. Since the system had Vista media with it, that's what I used.
If it weren't for our crap ticketing system, however, I'd be running RHEL on it instead...
I have a work laptop that Vista hates. A virginal install with all patches applied and updated hardware drivers would BSoD at least twice per work day. Lo and behold, windows 7 worked out of the box. The only thing that I've had any problems with on it so far is the PPTP connection to our corporate VPN. This always fails on the negotiation point, and I have to wonder if it isn't because they're trying to finally kill PPTP.
A handful of my customers are using Server 2008 w/ Terminal Services, and, so far, the window 7 system is the only one that has never thrown an error while launching an application or authenticating. Every other workstation I've used has had, well, issues. RDP 6.1 &.NET 3.5 SP1 fix most of those, but not all of them.
So I wouldn't exactly call it corporate suicide to upgrade. It might result in a temporary decrease in productivity while you have an employee out of the loop as you rebuild their workstation, but compare that time to what they'd lose if they were like me and had their station blue-screen and were forced to reboot twice a day or more.
I had just purged the RSS feed for their site from Firefox last night since I got sick of seeing nothing change since January 1st.
I'm glad to see that they're back up an running, and even more so now that they're providing more than just news. Here's to hoping that the site flourishes and maintains what I've come to expect so far plus more.
Damn straight. While getting used to where the configs reside in 'distro X' versus 'distro Y' is part of the learning curve for everyone, it shouldn't be.
This is the sort of thing that makes training new techs, let alone non-tech-savvy individuals, more complicated than it should be.
You don't EAT the damn stuff dude, you burn it! Who the hell CARES what it's made of? Sure seems like a lot less trouble and easier on the earth than digging deep into the earth and dredging up old dead dinosaurs to burn.
Actually, most oil comes from dead algae, not dead dinosaurs. Check the section entitled 'Formation' in the aforementioned Wiki link. So in this regard, we're just changing the current status of the input material.
Actually, given the number of cordless phones and other devices operating in the 2.4 - 5.6 GHz range, it's clearly not the frequency (or even density) of the energy that's harming them... It's really the 802.11(a|b|g|n) protocol that's making them suffer!
Actually, having worked in an ISP (and Teleco) call center, I can assure you that they have absolutely no interest whatsoever in making things better for their consumers. I will preface this with the caveat that I worked for a CLEC. Maybe it's different for an ILEC, but I doubt it.
The company I worked for spent more time nursing ancient systems back to health than would have been necessary to replace them and migrate the data. They sell crap ADSL modems that lose sync if you use more than 6' of run-of-the-mill phone line between the modem and the wall. Hell, for a while they were selling modems running in router mode that had a known firmware bug which would cause said modem to revert to bridge mode, thereby effectively disconnecting the customer until you powercycled it. Of course they denied that there was an issue.
Oh, and let's not forget that their primary DHCP market was so overbooked and poorly configured that they ran out of IPs to lease. Granted, they did fix this eventually by adding in another subnet, but you'd think that they would have seen this coming and proactively moved to prevent it ever being an issue.
This company was turning a profit, so why do all of the cheap tricks? Because it meant that they didn't have to spend money to make their network better and could instead spend it on their bonuses and attempting to expand into new markets.
The slow progression of modem speeds didn't require much work or effort on the ISPs' part. The copper lines could already handle the data speeds, so all they really had to do was replace their modems and, sometimes, their servers. (Yes, I know there's more to it than that, but not by much). FiOS is different in that it requires the placement of new lines, but what makes you think that these companies will decide to run fiber to all of the places that they haven't already run copper? Just because there's less signal loss and they can theoretically connect more residences/businesses to their network gear that are farther away from their COs doesn't mean they're going to spend the capital to actually lay the fiber down. You'll see FiOS going in where ADSL already is, but not much further than that.
This is why I say that I don't trust companies to improve their infrastructure.
Also, Taevin has much more succinctly stated what I was going for here...
And the internet companies would benefit too, because they could take the extra money and invest in upgrades to the network.
I started to write a lengthy response to this, but I scrapped it and will go with a much shorter response... HAHA!
In all seriousness, however, I don't know about in the U.K., but here in the states I would never trust a company to use excess money to increase/improve infrastructure, provide better service, or even hire more techs. Actually, I'd never trust them to do anything with it except pad their own balance-sheets and the wallets of their C-level executives.
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Aside from all being hosted on the same server, well, DiG says the PTR is for 'mail.fourguysfromtampa.com' and that the nameservers belong to Datapipe. So she's got one IIS system hosting multiple copies of the same crap, never asked her hosting company / DNS holder to update the PTRs, and hasn't made any effort to customize her 404 pages. Your point being? (I kid).
I'm actually a little surprised she didn't invoke John Dozier to protect her precious IP claims...
I was waiting for the Eva reference. Thanks!
I would be exceptionally happy if this acquisition meant a return of the linux-native VM Infrastructure Client, even if nothing else came of it.
I haven't really watched it much in the past few years (I think season 11 was the last one I saw?), but I imagine Iron Chef America is keeping him a little busy.
But as for his books, oh hell yes. Some of them include generic methods that are far more valuable than specific recipes. Kinda like known the SMTP protocol instead of just being able to configure Sendmail...
That's not a problem I've ever had either, and the ticketing system we use at work is (unfortunately) flash-based. I've left Firefox open with 5-10 tabs, including the ticket system, for weeks at a time without it crashing. Granted, this is with the newest flash on Windows 7 x32, so YMMV. At home I don't typically leave Firefox open longer than when I'm using it, but that usually spans four to five hours with multiple tabs as well, though there I tend to avoid the flash sites out of principle. One notable exception is that my wife watches YouTube for hours on end, and the worst that happens there is high memory usage.
Undoubtedly. Also, forget not that ICP / Psychopath Records has a huge marketing thing (and their own YouTube channel) where they sell literally hundreds, if not thousands, of ICP-related crap products to the Juggalo crowd. It's all about the money, and nothing more. If their fans could be educated to the point that they saw that, well, ICP would be out of a career.
The install finished relatively painlessly after about 30 minutes last night, and it's working like a champ. Unlike Ubuntu 9.10, Fedora 13 found my wireless card and the correct resolution for my monitor right away. The only things I can say are 'worse' about it are that 1) MySQL-server is installed by default (and I can't remove it without taking the desktop with it for some reason), and 2) installing the MP3 codecs on Ubuntu was a bit easier.
Now, with regards to point 1... I like MySQL - I really do - I just don't need it on my laptop. Well, the client is nice to have, but the server is overkill. For number two all I had to do was enable the FreshRPM repos and everything else took care of itself.
Will kick it around for another couple of weeks before deciding whether or not to put it on my main system. For what it's worth I used the 32-bit build instead of the 64-bit one.
Indeed I am. With the changes that are being proposed for 10.10, I'm not too happy with the Canonical people anymore. I'm sure this install won't be a breeze, but only time will tell. The biggest problem I have on my laptop is the widescreen wasn't recognized by X in a friendly manner (I worked around that, however, with a few tweaks to xorg.conf). Though I won't be putting fedora on my main rig - I'm thinking CentOS for that and Fedora for the laptop.
I'm also getting pissed at dolphin either. the old konqueror browser|file manager was pretty decent. dolphin OTOH plain sucks, from the way it displays stuff in detailed view, the impossibility of reordering the columns, how the tree view pane keeps moving the directory tree left and right by itself. again, any sugestions of a replacement that looks/feels more like the old konqueror will welcome.
Right click on a folder, go into properties, click on the wrench & screwdriver icon (settings?), and remove Dolphin from the list of apps to open folders with. Move Konqueror up to the top of the list. Click 'okay' and wait for the system to update the configuration. Done.
Ah... That game brings back some serious memories. That was the game my senior year in college...
To this day I'm glad Square had the balls to actually do a state-side release. They were too worried that the religious themes would scare off customers / annoy the religious nutters.
Unfortunately, I can't really play it anymore. The graphics were sub-par even when it was released, and now they're almost unwatchable. Though it did have one of the greatest soundtracks I've ever heard in a game. If only they hadn't made the prequels such a mess...
Pennsylvania is riddled with old mines, both from limestone and coal excavation. It's relatively cheap to purchase 'waste' space that another company excavated fifty to seventy years ago.
Also, I'm a little remiss that I never knew this existed. I grew up one county over from Butler County and would have loved to have toured a facility like this. Then again, it probably didn't exist in its present state when I was growing up...
Unambiguous advertising or promotion.
Pages that are exclusively promotional, and would need to be fundamentally rewritten to become encyclopedic. Note that simply having a company or product as its subject does not qualify an article for this criterion.
In the "Team Twinny" article, that's exactly the case. There was another similar article for a deli in London that met an identical fate: all the article had was the street address, phone number, and a marketing blurb about what they sell. Had there been a history of the store, or perhaps something else other than just stating 'this is where we are and what we sell' it might have made the cut.
I just spent the last fifteen to twenty minutes perusing the Special:NewPages, and it's terrifying. For every actual encyclopaedic or even semi-valid article, there seem to be a handful of pages that are pure garbage. There are "articles" about fictitious bands, self-promotion, slander, and things that really don't matter. On top of that, many of the new submissions seem to be very poorly written from a grammatical point of view. They're not quite as bad as the average YouTube comment, but they're close. If I was in charge over there, I'd be deleting things left and right as well.
There are probably a number of reasons for the lack of quality, but certainly the ability for anyone to contribute has got to be a big part. Is there an easy fix? No, probably not. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the barriers to approval are lop-sided, so raising them won't necessarily help. It's not like potential users will put up with taking a written exam just to be able to edit a single page...
I would suggest using privilege escalation to grant users more power and control based on how long they've been members and require that when people create accounts, they specify a number of areas that they possess knowledge of. Say I create a new account. When a user creates a login, he has to pick five to ten topics that he thinks he's qualified to write about (and these can be fairly broad, otherwise we'd have far too many checkboxes). He can't make any changes or contributions for a week (to prevent people from signing up just to vandalize articles) and can only lurk and learn the rules. Then, after that time period is up, he's allowed to only make changes to existing articles in his self-proclaimed fields. If he makes enough good and accepted changes, then allow him to start writing new articles in his self-proclaimed fields. Finally, after a period of time has passed where he's acknowledged as knowing what he's talking about and not a jerk who does things for the lulz, let him make changes/create articles anywhere.
One thing I would love to see done more than anything else, however, is the clear separation of fiction and non-fiction, by at least a subdomain, if not an entirely different FQDN. Star Wars as a film and a cultural institution in America? That goes in Wikipedia as non-fiction. Luke Skywalker as a person? That's in-universe and belongs in Wookiepedia, or at least in the fiction section. A biography of Luke doesn't belong in the same encyclopaedia as one about Louis Pasteur, plain and simple.
no one expects that grandma and grandpa know how to what SSL is and what it does.
I just consider this sort of typo a cheap and lazy form of story encryption...
What I find even crazier is that most Germans I've talked to agree with this speech law. I suppose Germans don't value free speech as much as the Americans.
I'm going to Godwin this, but only because it's true...
IIRC, it's not that Germans don't value the freedom of expression, but rather that they're still suffering from a pretty bad case of what we'd term 'pendulum swing'. You see, after World War II ended, they got a little touchy about people being able to openly spew hateful and hurtful speeches. They clamped down pretty hard on peoples' ability to say what they want, though not directly through legislation, and it never really let up. To this day the Germans still remember what happened to them as a nation the last time bullying, lying, and insulting others went unchecked - they started a war that involved a fairly large number of countries and ended up with them losing and, essentially, being split in two. So, as a result, the older generation, and even the current on (albeit to a lesser extent) is really strict about policing itself.
Penny Arcade's 'Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory' also comes into play here... When hiding behind a screen of semi-anonymity, people with an audience will say and do just about anything to get a rise out of others. This is, unfortunately, part of human nature.
Given that, it's not difficult to see why they're overly sensitive about what people do and say on-line. They're trying, in their own misguided and ill-conceived way, to put the same sort of self-policing mechanism in place on the web that they use in real-life. But since they have to deal with an enormous number of outside influences (read: every site on the internet that doesn't originate in Germany), they have to use the club of law instead of the softer form of social pressure that works when people are standing around talking in the town square. Unfortunately for them, the 'net and the town square aren't the same thing and certainly don't work the same way.
Or, to summarize; this law, though probably poorly-written, is conceived with good intentions, though we all know how that goes.
It wasn't by choice. The laptop was crufty (and had Vista on it) when I got it, so I wiped & reinstalled to get rid of the things previous employees had left behind. Since the system had Vista media with it, that's what I used.
If it weren't for our crap ticketing system, however, I'd be running RHEL on it instead...
I have a work laptop that Vista hates. A virginal install with all patches applied and updated hardware drivers would BSoD at least twice per work day. Lo and behold, windows 7 worked out of the box. The only thing that I've had any problems with on it so far is the PPTP connection to our corporate VPN. This always fails on the negotiation point, and I have to wonder if it isn't because they're trying to finally kill PPTP.
.NET 3.5 SP1 fix most of those, but not all of them.
A handful of my customers are using Server 2008 w/ Terminal Services, and, so far, the window 7 system is the only one that has never thrown an error while launching an application or authenticating. Every other workstation I've used has had, well, issues. RDP 6.1 &
So I wouldn't exactly call it corporate suicide to upgrade. It might result in a temporary decrease in productivity while you have an employee out of the loop as you rebuild their workstation, but compare that time to what they'd lose if they were like me and had their station blue-screen and were forced to reboot twice a day or more.
I had just purged the RSS feed for their site from Firefox last night since I got sick of seeing nothing change since January 1st.
I'm glad to see that they're back up an running, and even more so now that they're providing more than just news. Here's to hoping that the site flourishes and maintains what I've come to expect so far plus more.
Except that Malaria isn't caused by a virus - it's a protozoan. (Yes, I get the funny, I just had to be a little pedantic).
Almalexia and Sotha Sil? Don't they get positions too?
Damn straight. While getting used to where the configs reside in 'distro X' versus 'distro Y' is part of the learning curve for everyone, it shouldn't be.
This is the sort of thing that makes training new techs, let alone non-tech-savvy individuals, more complicated than it should be.
You don't EAT the damn stuff dude, you burn it! Who the hell CARES what it's made of? Sure seems like a lot less trouble and easier on the earth than digging deep into the earth and dredging up old dead dinosaurs to burn.
Actually, most oil comes from dead algae, not dead dinosaurs. Check the section entitled 'Formation' in the aforementioned Wiki link. So in this regard, we're just changing the current status of the input material.
Actually, given the number of cordless phones and other devices operating in the 2.4 - 5.6 GHz range, it's clearly not the frequency (or even density) of the energy that's harming them... It's really the 802.11(a|b|g|n) protocol that's making them suffer!
Actually, having worked in an ISP (and Teleco) call center, I can assure you that they have absolutely no interest whatsoever in making things better for their consumers. I will preface this with the caveat that I worked for a CLEC. Maybe it's different for an ILEC, but I doubt it.
The company I worked for spent more time nursing ancient systems back to health than would have been necessary to replace them and migrate the data. They sell crap ADSL modems that lose sync if you use more than 6' of run-of-the-mill phone line between the modem and the wall. Hell, for a while they were selling modems running in router mode that had a known firmware bug which would cause said modem to revert to bridge mode, thereby effectively disconnecting the customer until you powercycled it. Of course they denied that there was an issue.
Oh, and let's not forget that their primary DHCP market was so overbooked and poorly configured that they ran out of IPs to lease. Granted, they did fix this eventually by adding in another subnet, but you'd think that they would have seen this coming and proactively moved to prevent it ever being an issue.
This company was turning a profit, so why do all of the cheap tricks? Because it meant that they didn't have to spend money to make their network better and could instead spend it on their bonuses and attempting to expand into new markets.
The slow progression of modem speeds didn't require much work or effort on the ISPs' part. The copper lines could already handle the data speeds, so all they really had to do was replace their modems and, sometimes, their servers. (Yes, I know there's more to it than that, but not by much). FiOS is different in that it requires the placement of new lines, but what makes you think that these companies will decide to run fiber to all of the places that they haven't already run copper? Just because there's less signal loss and they can theoretically connect more residences/businesses to their network gear that are farther away from their COs doesn't mean they're going to spend the capital to actually lay the fiber down. You'll see FiOS going in where ADSL already is, but not much further than that.
This is why I say that I don't trust companies to improve their infrastructure. Also, Taevin has much more succinctly stated what I was going for here...
And the internet companies would benefit too, because they could take the extra money and invest in upgrades to the network.
I started to write a lengthy response to this, but I scrapped it and will go with a much shorter response... HAHA!
In all seriousness, however, I don't know about in the U.K., but here in the states I would never trust a company to use excess money to increase/improve infrastructure, provide better service, or even hire more techs. Actually, I'd never trust them to do anything with it except pad their own balance-sheets and the wallets of their C-level executives.