China has a number of popular domestic streaming platforms, perhaps the move to block twitch as it became popular is also to protect their buddies.
It's probably really the following.
1) Twitch isn't based in China and it does live streaming. That makes it threat because Chinese Twitch users might be able to live broadcast The Revolution - if it ever happens there.
2) It helps China based competitors who also cooperate with the government to stay in business and the government does have a way to get them to very quickly stop streaming The Revolution - again, if it ever happens.
3) For some reason I really don't get, right now China is becoming anti-game on mobile devices and since Twitch is used a lot for streaming game play, blocking a service used to promote game play does fit into their current plans.
There are a shit-ton of "experiences" on Facebook that I haven't "opted in" to. Indeed, when I try to turn them off, Facebook turns them right back on again (most notably "Most Recent" versus "Top Stories", and "Login via profile picture"). Facebook should be trusted with precisely nothing.
You're quite right. And it's even worse. While I like Facebook in that it's a good way to be able to contact distant friends and relatives from time to time and sometimes people I know do actually post interesting things there, I really wonder what exactly Zuckerberg is thinking. Facebook has become a lot less user friendly, and it's get worse all the time. Now, if you start to write up a post and change your mind, too bad. You can change the contents but you can't not post something. If you don't click to post it once you start writing, it will just basically hang there forever. In the past you could start writing something, change your mind, and get rid of it. Not any more. Another problem is cutting and pasting. Myself and a few other people have had problems where a cut and paste attempt failed to overwrite something previously in the buffer on the PC and when we pasted into Facebook, something we didn't want to paste got there. And you can't remove it if it's a link. So I had a link to something about a Disney film in a post that had nothing to do with Disney or movies because I had previously copied the link to put in an email I sent and my attempt to cut and paste something different into the buffer to use in my Facebook post failed. I don't get how not letting you undo stuff is making the whole experience better, Zuckerberg.
For the subject at hand, I don't really understand why people would want to contacts banks and credit card companies from within Facebook and then expect that Facebook won't try to get their info. I didn't think it required an extraordinary IQ to realize that anything you do in Facebook is subject to Facebook knowing about it. Maybe people are just a lot stupider than I realized.
Can't you buy a phone from an electronics store without any sim inside it in the US ?
The US mobile phone business works very differently from that of other countries for a variety of reasons, some of which are actually kind of stupid. But your question is very specific and I'll instead deal with the question of "Can't you buy an unlocked phone from an electronics store in the US?" which would cover phones that may or may not have SIMs in them but are definitely unlocked, which is what you are really asking about. It is possible to do so, but such phones are hard to buy and will contain no discounts of any kind. For iphones, you may have to buy them directly from Apple as the mobile phone companies here may refuse to sell you an unlocked phone. The way mobile phones (called "cell phones" universally here in the USA) work is that you buy them from a phone company and they give you a discount in exchange for you signing a contract, usually 2 years, with the phone company. Such phones at a discount are locked. It is possible to get locked phones unlocked. Once your original contract ends, you can ask the phone company to unlock it for you. AT&T and T-Mobile should be willing to do this without complaint. I have no experience with Verizon and Sprint or any other smaller companies. It is also possible to pay a 3rd party company to unlock your phone. I have an old iPhone 5c I got unlocked by using http://www.doctorsim.com/ to do it. I paid their cheapest price to unlock it and it took about a month, but they did unlock it. Because my phone bill was paid for by my work, it's a long story but I couldn't get AT&T to unlock it directly because they required some account information that I don't have because I never see my bill, so I had to use DoctorSim to do it.
This is why we need stronger consumer protection. This isn't a weird, difficult, complex issue. In my mind, there's a very simple solution to this:
Make it illegal for digital media stores to remove access to anything that has been purchased. If, for some reason, they're unable to continue hosting it for streaming, they should be legally required to provide you with a DRM-free download.
Your post makes some fine points, but let's all remember this happened in Canada. Had it happened in the USA, there may be a legal precedent basically in favor of what you proposed. The actor Bruce Willis got into a case where he wanted to leave his legally purchased song downloads to his children in his will and he had to go to court for the right to do that. He won. The providers of his downloads basically argued that Willis had entered into what was, in effect, a rental agreement for the songs, and as such no rights were transferable upon his death. He won and established the idea that he actually paid for the songs, he owned his copies, and as such they were his property to give away to his heirs in his will if he wished.
Sure the internet is shit compared to the big cities, but they probably don't have to spend several hours stuck in traffic every day. If there were a perfect place where you could truly have it all, everyone would try to move their and that would probably ruin it. So ask yourself what's really important to you and realize that you might have to give up some other things in pursuit of that.
There are more trade offs than just "Less traffic for slower internet" in small towns. I know that a ton of people in small towns in the USA love to act like everything there is fantastic beyond belief, but one of the things that they have to trade is often quality of health care. True recent story - I have an acquaintance whose father had a stroke recently. He and her mother live in a small town in the boondocks in a southeastern state. If I understand correctly, she was at home visiting when in the early AM hours dad started having problems and they took him to the local "hospital". I'm not a doctor, but I do know that stroke victims do a lot better fi you get them to treatment quickly and they take certain drugs that can lessen the effects. I can't ask my acquaintance for sure about this, but based on what she has said it seems that dad did not get any special drugs. In fact, after a few hours they basically kicked him out because they "couldn't do anything else for him and he wasn't getting worse" which apparently meant that since he hadn't died or become a lot more unresponsive, buh bye. He ended up going to a hospital in one the largest cities in the state and he's not doing well. He has lost movement on one side of his body and has speech and memory issues. Could have had a better outcome if he lived in a big city and had access to a better hospital? I have to think so. I have a relative who had a stroke over a decade ago and she lives in a very large city. Her outcome was really good. No physical impairment or memory issues. Occasionally she has to stop to think for the words she wants to say, but it's not often. If you looked at her you'd never know she had a stroke.
if someone is still using dial-up connectivity with their TiVo in 2018, they probably don't have broadband access.
Honestly, I'm really getting tired of people who choose to live in the boondocks and then don't want to accept the reality of those decisions. It's probably not worth the cost to support the 100 or fewer people who still use dial up and have a TiVo. At some point the economics just don't make sense any more for TiVo to continue to support this old technology.
For some reason, many of the vendors all but insist I provide them my mobile phone number. I always refuse because I know that once I give out the phone number, my phone will start ringing with telemarketing calls. They vendors say they want the mobile phone number for back-up identification purposes, but I just do not believe them.
I agree with you and this is exactly why I still have a land line. It seems to really be VOIP from my cable TV provider, but it works exactly as a true land line. Still rings phones plugged into a wall phone jack. I've got Nomorobo (https://www.nomorobo.com/ ) on it, which does an excellent job for free of stopping telemarketers. So now if anybody demands a phone number for any reason, they get the land line. They can send SMS ("texts" to USA people) all day to it and it will do nothing. They can call it and the odds are pretty good that they either won't get through or I won't answer (I have caller ID so I can refuse to answer if I don't know the caller). I decided that the $25 or so that I pay each month for the land line was worth it just to keep my mobile phone number private.
If Trump is so opposed to this because he knows that the garbage his followers share on social media that is untrue is going to be caught up in this. For example, a few weeks someone I know from high school, who lives in a small town in a very conservative "red state", posted a link to article claiming that California was registering every illegal immigrant that they could find to vote. Now, let's look at this logically. Let's just go wild and claim that they really did register 10 million illegal immigrants to illegally vote. I picked that number because it's insanely high and Republicans always like to claim that we've already got a problem with huge numbers of illegal votes. Well, because of the electoral college, you win California by 1 vote or 10 million extra illegal votes, you still just win California. So registering illegal voters doesn't hurt Trump. And if all those illegal voters influence other elections fraudulently, well, I would think that citizens of the state would have recourse to use the courts to seek relief. No doubt registering illegal voters intentionally is a crime, probably a big one. And there certainly are conservative areas of California, like Orange County, where I would think that a lawsuit over this, if it was true, would find a favorable judge to hear it. But no, let's just make wild claims and get people outraged over nothing because an outraged conservative is a voting conservative I guess.
What malarky is this? Americans have the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure in the 4th amendment, from the US Govt. It says so right there, and there are no clauses based on locality.
I'm not a lawyer, but I have good friends who are and I definitely know more about the law than you do.
1) None of your rights in the Constitution are absolute. None of them. Easiest example is the classic "You can't yell fire in a crowded theater to cause a panic for fun and then claim it was protected under free speech."
2) The key word here is unreasonable. UNREASONABLE. Read that word. To be legal, the search just has to be defined as reasonable. And you don't get to decide it if it is.
it's the people who estimated the strength loss factor, not the people who did nothing once they found out.
They both failed at their jobs resulting in loss of life, by the sound of it. And maybe both will see jail time; after all Italy prosecuted a couple of geologists for failing to predict an earthquake.
I know this is going to sound like typical American xenophobia, but it's really not. I really wish what I was going to say wasn't accurate. Given how this is Italy, like in most of the EU (I would count France and the soon to leave UK as among the few exceptions) they might convict the people involved for the loss of life, but they won't serve much time at all because in the EU there's a general belief that you have to rehab criminals and you can't actually punish them. Think I'm being ridiculous? There's a recent case in Spain where some rapists got out of jail after a few months because their lawyers are appealing the verdict and it would just be too cruel to keep convicted rapists in jail while the appeal drags on. Another recent case in Germany had a step-father and a mother who sold their son to a pedophile for abuse. Step-dad got 10 years. Mom got about 12. Pedophile dude got about 10. And Germany says these sentences are "really long". But don't worry. I'm sure about halfway through, at most, the legal system will start to feel sorry for them and they'll start getting weekend releases and so on. So in Italy, which by the way has been incredibly lenient over the years to hardened criminals, I'd guess maybe they get 10 years tops for this and they'll actually serve 1 to 2 years for it.
But nothing on a consumer grade flight sim will provide you with any skill.
I think that was actually good enough for the "pilot" we're talking about. Based on the transcripts of his conversations coming to a safe landing didn't seem to be much of a concern or maybe even intended at all. He seemed to want to know enough to get off the ground, do some crazy acrobatics and there was no real plan to get safely back to ground. I don't know if he deliberately crashed or not, but at "best" I'd say his plan was to try to land with a very low chance of success.
I don't have a pension fund (401K like most Americans here) so I can't compare this to anything I know, but I did the math and based on the numbers above, they have $608510 allocated per retiree. I would think that's amazingly generous for a pension fund. I can tell you based on numbers I've seen that less than 10% of 401K holders will ever reach that number or higher. I would also think that based on having so much money that the pension managers should probably know more than to invest in Oracle as a major component of their pension fund. If they don't, then they don't understand what they are doing. Oracle was a pretty poor investment between 2015 and 2017 where if you bought any before 2015 you basically didn't make any money at all. I can't speak to whether Oracle really lied or not, but it does seem on the surface that a pension fund management company placed a bad bet and they are looking for scapegoats.
So in the main article it talks about "Mental Health Hacks". What does "hack" mean any more? It seems that it can mean almost anything. I've seen people talk about, for example, putting hot sauce on vanilla ice cream as a "hack". I wouldn't think that a topic as important as somebody's mental health would involve hacking, yet here we are. It reminds me of what a smart guy I worked with said once - when something is everybody's responsibility, it's nobody's responsibility. Similarly, I guess now that hack apparently can mean anything, it means nothing. Maybe writers need to stop being cute and try for understandability instead. What a concept.
Wait, up to 50.000 high-paying jobs? All I see are stories about how Amazon underpays their employees and how being a warehouse worker is dreadful. So, define high-paying I guess?
I can't believe I have to explain this, but Amazon right now is more than Jeff Bezos + warehouse workers. Amazon actually has an HQ building where people have desk jobs. The idea is that HQ2 will have more of those desk jobs in it.
I love how people refer to rural areas as backwaters. Yet folks from the city get all bent out of shape when we call their dirty shitholes what they are, dirty shitholes. Enjoy choking on smog and surface level ozone. Meanwhile I'll enjoy the fresh air and clean water in my "backwater"
Let me guess. You only vote Republican. Be sure and tell us what you think when you don't have fresh air and clean water any more because those things are inconvenient to businesses. But on the other hand businesses don't go where you live anyway, so you may dodge a bullet yet. Say hi to Barney and Andy for me.
They say that the problem was people that 'abused' the system, meaning people that took them up on the original offer as stated. Even at three movies a month, they're still buying tickets at full price and selling them for less. So yeah, I think they'd need about 90% of their subscribers to pay them each month and choose not to see any movies. Good luck with that.
I get your point, but nobody complains about AMC's competing Stubs A-List offering. It allows you to see 3 movies a week and costs $19.95 a month. No restrictions on what you see or when you see it, but it must be at an AMC theater. I don't see anybody saying AMC is going to go under from this. In fact, it may be profitable for Movie Pass at the $9.95 rate or maybe they lose so little money that their selling of subscriber, info, which apparently is the real key to their business model, can actually make them a modest profit now with the lower costs.
My e-mail is currently Outlook and it uses Exchange. If I want to replace Outlook I need whatever I use to also be able to connect to Exchange.
I used to use Thunderbird, but no longer do. Basically I got with my current employer because they (Fortune 500 company) bought out my previous employer. For a few years they left us alone and we managed our own email and I used Thunderbird. Still miss Thunderbird. It was awesome. Outlook is not awesome. It's better than Lotus Notes, but what isn't? Here's a problem you may have. In theory I could make Thunderbird connect to our Exchange server, but the problem is that to set it up, it requires some information about the Exchange server that I don't know and can't get because I don't have a need to know. Also, our company uses Calendar a lot and I don't know a way to make Thunderbird handle that correctly from Exchange. Sadly, it's accurate to say here that if you have to ask, you won't be able to make it work.
First this is OLD NEWS this happened a month or so ago i switched back to 5.44 and denied CCleaner internet access and i manually check for updates Their hasn't been any since the first broke news.. wtf is going on here at/. anymore? news that really matters doesn't show for weeks after?
Wait probably 3-4 days for this whole story to be resubmitted as brand new. I'm not kidding. And don't be shocked if it only takes 2 days for it happen.
At least this resubmission could be useful. We also tend to get submissions where the submitter lacks good reading skills. For example, someone will say something like "Not X. Definitely not X. Whatever you are thinking it is, it's not X. It could be anything else but it never was and never will be X." Then the submitter will say "They said it's X! They said it's X!"
I wonder if those judges have ever had second thoughts about their decisions, which resulted in taking away people's houses, based on possibly fraudulent statements by banks?
I'm not an attorney, but I have quite a few good friends who are attorneys. I can answer that for you. For most if not all - nope. They don't care if their decision screwed people over. One of the really bad things about attorneys in the USA is that there is a belief that goes with the job that the system is always right, even when the outcomes are wrong. Some crazy guy sues you unjustly and you have to wipe out your money to defend yourself from it? Lawyers would tell you that the system works. They don't care if it's abused as long as they get paid. And the number one dirty secret of the legal profession is that lawyers always get paid no matter what. In fact, cops will go out of their way to do all kinds of things to help lawyers get paid. If you owe a lawyer money and it goes unpaid long enough, cops are happy to show up at your door and start taking your stuff to sell to get money or to start seizing your paychecks. If someone owes you a big amount of money and won't pay it, good luck trying to get someone (judge, police) to care enough to do anything about it. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. But they always make sure that lawyers get paid. I have a friend whose wife went a little crazy and she divorced him. She quit her job to make sure she had no income coming in and hired one of her city's highest priced bulldog female divorce lawyers to represent her. Didn't pay a dime to the lawyer but ran up over $30,000 in legal fees. Her lawyer sued the husband for the entire cost and a sympathetic judge made him pay it. This is why I say that lawyers always get paid. Think about it - a lawyer took a case knowing her client wouldn't pay her because she also knew the system would let her collect from the estranged husband. So no, I can assure you that the vast majority of the judges, if not every single one of them, don't care at all.
What's to stop one person from signing up legitimately and then giving copies of the browser to others who did not register? Does the browser check IDs? If so, does that slow it down? We've got people here in the USA who don't want to be identified for anything, so yeah, not real surprised that some people were threatened by this and got that point across. On the other hand, I was almost thinking that all the dumb "solutions in search of a problem" ideas for companies had surely been taken by now. but I am wrong about that.
I can tell from your post that you have never worked for any government agency, ever.
What are the costs to rewrite the water-billing software, payroll software, work order system, etc, and then integrate them all together?
Probably not very much if the original systems are properly documented so you have a clear idea of what you are doing, and plenty of test data. Plus your hardware costs would probably be 1/4 what they are at present, so you could factor this as part of your "rolling upgrade plan" -you do have plans for a rolling upgrade, don't you?
Systems won't be documented. Whatever 3rd party wrote them will make sure of that so the government will have to pay them for any future changes. And you could knock me over with a feather if what apparently is something like a county government has any plans for a "rolling upgrade" in the future. Their plan is to keep using old systems until they fall apart and they have to buy new ones.
How many Linux gurus are willing to take the pay cut to work at the same rate as a Windows guru?
Since they are probably 4 times as productive (ie believe the statistic is more like 10 times) none would need to.
You clearly have no idea how costly it is to keep a pile of shit like Windows on the road, even without malware problems.
In the old days, they used to say "Nobody got fired for buying IBM". Now nobody gets fired for buying Windows. Plus, people know how to use Windows. You want to run Linux? Good luck getting a bunch of non-techies to get in board with reading email via anything but Outlook. I can assure you that governments don't care how much it costs to run Windows. Plus, for what it's worth, my previous employer tried to suck up to Microsoft (they gave us a pittance of their business, but they were a customer we had) and actually wrote and published a white paper "proving" that Windows was more cost effective than Linux, which was hilarious because the majority of our business actually ran on Linux. So you can say all you want that Linux is cheaper, but some pointy haired boss will have no problem finding various papers saying otherwise.
The more illegal aliens a state has, the higher the chances are that they will get more representatives after the next census.
The sun will also come up tomorrow. So what's your point?
For those who don't know, the US Constitution is silent on whether illegal aliens count in a census or not, mainly because when the document was written, there was no such thing as an illegal alien. You got on a ship, you came to the USA, they let you in. I'm not a lawyer so I can't cite specific cases, but basically the law is interpreted that you just count bodies in the census and you don't put people into groups of legal or illegal to determine how representatives are spread out in the US House of Representatives. And for those who don't know about that, the number of representatives is fixed at 435 and basically the more people you have living in your state, the more representatives you have for your state. No state can by law have fewer than 1 representative. California, the most populous state at present, currently has 53 representatives. Rhode Island and Vermont have 1 each. There may be a few more states with only one like maybe Wyoming and possibly one or both of the Dakotas.
Its pretty clear MoviePass is jsut a marketing firm looking to get picked up by a big company. They have no plan, no warchest, nothing. All everyone has to do is wait them out and they can pick it up for pennies on the dollar if they want it. MoviePass is done.
Well, it seems that they did have a plan. It just wasn't a very good one. Apparently the real plan was that they knew they would always lose money on the movie part of it, but they thought that the personal information that subscribers had to give up to buy the movie plan was worth so much money that they could make a fortune selling that information. That did not prove to be the case. Some stock market analysts have speculated that they may be able to turn a modest profit with these changes, but it probably depends on how many of their customers are super cheap and have a lot of spare time to spend at the movies. If a large number of subscribers are OK with waiting more than 2 weeks to see a film on the cheap, and/or very flexible about when they go, and/or willing to pay extra to see a film sooner than after 2 weeks, there is some chance they may be able to stop bleeding cash. There's also speculation that yet another massive reverse stock split is coming and all I can tell you is that reverse splits are a Hail Mary play (American football reference) to try to save a failing business. I've never heard of a company doing two of those and surviving.
The tech companies have made the decision that providing lunch is a bennie and it keeps people inside the bubble longer. If San Fransisco passes the "no cafeteria" regs, expect the corporate offices to rent food trucks on a rotation to stop in front of their office, seven days a week. The press on the local food establishments will be insane. People don't want to integrate into the community, they want to work and go home. Forcing them to go out for take out just annoys them.
Good point. They may also just bring their lunch rather than deal with the time necessary to go off campus and the prices necessary to do so. What are the local restaurants going to do then? Also, I've never seen anywhere where a mass produced lunch was just awesome all the time. It just can't be. Sure, maybe there are some things that the free lunch providers get right, but there's just no way it can be great all the time. And people are still choosing, for whatever reason, to eat the free lunch even when it's not all that good. If people are willing to eat crummy food just because it's free, that doesn't suggest to me that they'll be very excited to have to eat out and pay for it and will actually do what they can to not do that.
Who cares what the White House says? What does Taiwan have to say about it?
They're pretty upset in general. Just like any place, there are some small numbers of crazy people and in this particular case I would call people who actively want Taiwan to become part of China right now if not sooner by the term "crazy". But such people aren't in large numbers, but they do exist. I'd say they're maybe 1% of the population at most. Now, you do need to understand that similar to how in the USA the Republicans and Democrats have demonized each other, Taiwan has a similar situation where the "pan-green coaltion" of independence minded parties enjoys accusing the "pan-blue coalition" (mostly the KMT - the old Nationalist party of Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek) of wanting to surrender Taiwan to China ASAP. While there are probably a small number of KMT aligned people who do want that, as an outsider my opinion is that the vast majority of KMT members simply want Taiwan to survive as it is right now and to ensure that it does they are playing games with China in acting like reunification is their ultimate goal, but in reality they are actually just trying to keep Taiwan from being invaded.
I read the Taipei Times online and I have a good friend who lives in Taiwan that I happened to have talked to a few days ago. Taiwanese people in general are pretty upset at this constant and unending erosion of their space everywhere. Lots of companies have now changed their websites to outright say that Taiwan is part of China. Honestly, this whole thing reminds me a hell of a lot of the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia where the world turned a blind eye. Can anybody here list a recent similar situation where a democratic country/territory (the later is for the crazy pro-Beijing nuts who might be here) was threatened with takeover simply for being democratic? You see the Taiwan poses 2 threats to Beijing. Number one is that it shows that a democracy can work with Chinese people. One of China's secret arguments, one that even Jacky Chan has publicly supported, is that Chinese people can't be trusted with democracy and need to be told what to do. The other threat is that lack of control over Taiwan prevents China from stopping oil shipments to Japan, who it still essentially views as an enemy who still must pay for the crimes it committed in WWII. A recent Chinese military document talked about that being an ultimate goal of China after they take over Taiwan. I know the world wants to ignore this and hope it goes away, but it won't and I can assure you that it is being ignored at everybody's peril and it just sends a message to bad actors like Xi and Putin that nobody in the west will stand up for the little guy if the big guys threaten him.
Slashdot Mirror
China has a number of popular domestic streaming platforms, perhaps the move to block twitch as it became popular is also to protect their buddies.
It's probably really the following.
1) Twitch isn't based in China and it does live streaming. That makes it threat because Chinese Twitch users might be able to live broadcast The Revolution - if it ever happens there.
2) It helps China based competitors who also cooperate with the government to stay in business and the government does have a way to get them to very quickly stop streaming The Revolution - again, if it ever happens.
3) For some reason I really don't get, right now China is becoming anti-game on mobile devices and since Twitch is used a lot for streaming game play, blocking a service used to promote game play does fit into their current plans.
There are a shit-ton of "experiences" on Facebook that I haven't "opted in" to. Indeed, when I try to turn them off, Facebook turns them right back on again (most notably "Most Recent" versus "Top Stories", and "Login via profile picture"). Facebook should be trusted with precisely nothing.
You're quite right. And it's even worse. While I like Facebook in that it's a good way to be able to contact distant friends and relatives from time to time and sometimes people I know do actually post interesting things there, I really wonder what exactly Zuckerberg is thinking. Facebook has become a lot less user friendly, and it's get worse all the time. Now, if you start to write up a post and change your mind, too bad. You can change the contents but you can't not post something. If you don't click to post it once you start writing, it will just basically hang there forever. In the past you could start writing something, change your mind, and get rid of it. Not any more. Another problem is cutting and pasting. Myself and a few other people have had problems where a cut and paste attempt failed to overwrite something previously in the buffer on the PC and when we pasted into Facebook, something we didn't want to paste got there. And you can't remove it if it's a link. So I had a link to something about a Disney film in a post that had nothing to do with Disney or movies because I had previously copied the link to put in an email I sent and my attempt to cut and paste something different into the buffer to use in my Facebook post failed. I don't get how not letting you undo stuff is making the whole experience better, Zuckerberg.
For the subject at hand, I don't really understand why people would want to contacts banks and credit card companies from within Facebook and then expect that Facebook won't try to get their info. I didn't think it required an extraordinary IQ to realize that anything you do in Facebook is subject to Facebook knowing about it. Maybe people are just a lot stupider than I realized.
Can't you buy a phone from an electronics store without any sim inside it in the US ?
The US mobile phone business works very differently from that of other countries for a variety of reasons, some of which are actually kind of stupid. But your question is very specific and I'll instead deal with the question of "Can't you buy an unlocked phone from an electronics store in the US?" which would cover phones that may or may not have SIMs in them but are definitely unlocked, which is what you are really asking about. It is possible to do so, but such phones are hard to buy and will contain no discounts of any kind. For iphones, you may have to buy them directly from Apple as the mobile phone companies here may refuse to sell you an unlocked phone. The way mobile phones (called "cell phones" universally here in the USA) work is that you buy them from a phone company and they give you a discount in exchange for you signing a contract, usually 2 years, with the phone company. Such phones at a discount are locked. It is possible to get locked phones unlocked. Once your original contract ends, you can ask the phone company to unlock it for you. AT&T and T-Mobile should be willing to do this without complaint. I have no experience with Verizon and Sprint or any other smaller companies. It is also possible to pay a 3rd party company to unlock your phone. I have an old iPhone 5c I got unlocked by using http://www.doctorsim.com/ to do it. I paid their cheapest price to unlock it and it took about a month, but they did unlock it. Because my phone bill was paid for by my work, it's a long story but I couldn't get AT&T to unlock it directly because they required some account information that I don't have because I never see my bill, so I had to use DoctorSim to do it.
This is why we need stronger consumer protection. This isn't a weird, difficult, complex issue. In my mind, there's a very simple solution to this:
Make it illegal for digital media stores to remove access to anything that has been purchased. If, for some reason, they're unable to continue hosting it for streaming, they should be legally required to provide you with a DRM-free download.
Your post makes some fine points, but let's all remember this happened in Canada. Had it happened in the USA, there may be a legal precedent basically in favor of what you proposed. The actor Bruce Willis got into a case where he wanted to leave his legally purchased song downloads to his children in his will and he had to go to court for the right to do that. He won. The providers of his downloads basically argued that Willis had entered into what was, in effect, a rental agreement for the songs, and as such no rights were transferable upon his death. He won and established the idea that he actually paid for the songs, he owned his copies, and as such they were his property to give away to his heirs in his will if he wished.
Sure the internet is shit compared to the big cities, but they probably don't have to spend several hours stuck in traffic every day. If there were a perfect place where you could truly have it all, everyone would try to move their and that would probably ruin it. So ask yourself what's really important to you and realize that you might have to give up some other things in pursuit of that.
There are more trade offs than just "Less traffic for slower internet" in small towns. I know that a ton of people in small towns in the USA love to act like everything there is fantastic beyond belief, but one of the things that they have to trade is often quality of health care. True recent story - I have an acquaintance whose father had a stroke recently. He and her mother live in a small town in the boondocks in a southeastern state. If I understand correctly, she was at home visiting when in the early AM hours dad started having problems and they took him to the local "hospital". I'm not a doctor, but I do know that stroke victims do a lot better fi you get them to treatment quickly and they take certain drugs that can lessen the effects. I can't ask my acquaintance for sure about this, but based on what she has said it seems that dad did not get any special drugs. In fact, after a few hours they basically kicked him out because they "couldn't do anything else for him and he wasn't getting worse" which apparently meant that since he hadn't died or become a lot more unresponsive, buh bye. He ended up going to a hospital in one the largest cities in the state and he's not doing well. He has lost movement on one side of his body and has speech and memory issues. Could have had a better outcome if he lived in a big city and had access to a better hospital? I have to think so. I have a relative who had a stroke over a decade ago and she lives in a very large city. Her outcome was really good. No physical impairment or memory issues. Occasionally she has to stop to think for the words she wants to say, but it's not often. If you looked at her you'd never know she had a stroke.
if someone is still using dial-up connectivity with their TiVo in 2018, they probably don't have broadband access.
Honestly, I'm really getting tired of people who choose to live in the boondocks and then don't want to accept the reality of those decisions. It's probably not worth the cost to support the 100 or fewer people who still use dial up and have a TiVo. At some point the economics just don't make sense any more for TiVo to continue to support this old technology.
For some reason, many of the vendors all but insist I provide them my mobile phone number. I always refuse because I know that once I give out the phone number, my phone will start ringing with telemarketing calls. They vendors say they want the mobile phone number for back-up identification purposes, but I just do not believe them.
I agree with you and this is exactly why I still have a land line. It seems to really be VOIP from my cable TV provider, but it works exactly as a true land line. Still rings phones plugged into a wall phone jack. I've got Nomorobo (https://www.nomorobo.com/ ) on it, which does an excellent job for free of stopping telemarketers. So now if anybody demands a phone number for any reason, they get the land line. They can send SMS ("texts" to USA people) all day to it and it will do nothing. They can call it and the odds are pretty good that they either won't get through or I won't answer (I have caller ID so I can refuse to answer if I don't know the caller). I decided that the $25 or so that I pay each month for the land line was worth it just to keep my mobile phone number private.
If Trump is so opposed to this because he knows that the garbage his followers share on social media that is untrue is going to be caught up in this. For example, a few weeks someone I know from high school, who lives in a small town in a very conservative "red state", posted a link to article claiming that California was registering every illegal immigrant that they could find to vote. Now, let's look at this logically. Let's just go wild and claim that they really did register 10 million illegal immigrants to illegally vote. I picked that number because it's insanely high and Republicans always like to claim that we've already got a problem with huge numbers of illegal votes. Well, because of the electoral college, you win California by 1 vote or 10 million extra illegal votes, you still just win California. So registering illegal voters doesn't hurt Trump. And if all those illegal voters influence other elections fraudulently, well, I would think that citizens of the state would have recourse to use the courts to seek relief. No doubt registering illegal voters intentionally is a crime, probably a big one. And there certainly are conservative areas of California, like Orange County, where I would think that a lawsuit over this, if it was true, would find a favorable judge to hear it. But no, let's just make wild claims and get people outraged over nothing because an outraged conservative is a voting conservative I guess.
What malarky is this? Americans have the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure in the 4th amendment, from the US Govt. It says so right there, and there are no clauses based on locality.
I'm not a lawyer, but I have good friends who are and I definitely know more about the law than you do.
1) None of your rights in the Constitution are absolute. None of them. Easiest example is the classic "You can't yell fire in a crowded theater to cause a panic for fun and then claim it was protected under free speech."
2) The key word here is unreasonable. UNREASONABLE. Read that word. To be legal, the search just has to be defined as reasonable. And you don't get to decide it if it is.
it's the people who estimated the strength loss factor, not the people who did nothing once they found out.
They both failed at their jobs resulting in loss of life, by the sound of it. And maybe both will see jail time; after all Italy prosecuted a couple of geologists for failing to predict an earthquake.
I know this is going to sound like typical American xenophobia, but it's really not. I really wish what I was going to say wasn't accurate. Given how this is Italy, like in most of the EU (I would count France and the soon to leave UK as among the few exceptions) they might convict the people involved for the loss of life, but they won't serve much time at all because in the EU there's a general belief that you have to rehab criminals and you can't actually punish them. Think I'm being ridiculous? There's a recent case in Spain where some rapists got out of jail after a few months because their lawyers are appealing the verdict and it would just be too cruel to keep convicted rapists in jail while the appeal drags on. Another recent case in Germany had a step-father and a mother who sold their son to a pedophile for abuse. Step-dad got 10 years. Mom got about 12. Pedophile dude got about 10. And Germany says these sentences are "really long". But don't worry. I'm sure about halfway through, at most, the legal system will start to feel sorry for them and they'll start getting weekend releases and so on. So in Italy, which by the way has been incredibly lenient over the years to hardened criminals, I'd guess maybe they get 10 years tops for this and they'll actually serve 1 to 2 years for it.
But nothing on a consumer grade flight sim will provide you with any skill.
I think that was actually good enough for the "pilot" we're talking about. Based on the transcripts of his conversations coming to a safe landing didn't seem to be much of a concern or maybe even intended at all. He seemed to want to know enough to get off the ground, do some crazy acrobatics and there was no real plan to get safely back to ground. I don't know if he deliberately crashed or not, but at "best" I'd say his plan was to try to land with a very low chance of success.
I don't have a pension fund (401K like most Americans here) so I can't compare this to anything I know, but I did the math and based on the numbers above, they have $608510 allocated per retiree. I would think that's amazingly generous for a pension fund. I can tell you based on numbers I've seen that less than 10% of 401K holders will ever reach that number or higher. I would also think that based on having so much money that the pension managers should probably know more than to invest in Oracle as a major component of their pension fund. If they don't, then they don't understand what they are doing. Oracle was a pretty poor investment between 2015 and 2017 where if you bought any before 2015 you basically didn't make any money at all. I can't speak to whether Oracle really lied or not, but it does seem on the surface that a pension fund management company placed a bad bet and they are looking for scapegoats.
So in the main article it talks about "Mental Health Hacks". What does "hack" mean any more? It seems that it can mean almost anything. I've seen people talk about, for example, putting hot sauce on vanilla ice cream as a "hack". I wouldn't think that a topic as important as somebody's mental health would involve hacking, yet here we are. It reminds me of what a smart guy I worked with said once - when something is everybody's responsibility, it's nobody's responsibility. Similarly, I guess now that hack apparently can mean anything, it means nothing. Maybe writers need to stop being cute and try for understandability instead. What a concept.
Wait, up to 50.000 high-paying jobs? All I see are stories about how Amazon underpays their employees and how being a warehouse worker is dreadful. So, define high-paying I guess?
I can't believe I have to explain this, but Amazon right now is more than Jeff Bezos + warehouse workers. Amazon actually has an HQ building where people have desk jobs. The idea is that HQ2 will have more of those desk jobs in it.
I love how people refer to rural areas as backwaters. Yet folks from the city get all bent out of shape when we call their dirty shitholes what they are, dirty shitholes. Enjoy choking on smog and surface level ozone. Meanwhile I'll enjoy the fresh air and clean water in my "backwater"
Let me guess. You only vote Republican. Be sure and tell us what you think when you don't have fresh air and clean water any more because those things are inconvenient to businesses. But on the other hand businesses don't go where you live anyway, so you may dodge a bullet yet. Say hi to Barney and Andy for me.
They say that the problem was people that 'abused' the system, meaning people that took them up on the original offer as stated. Even at three movies a month, they're still buying tickets at full price and selling them for less. So yeah, I think they'd need about 90% of their subscribers to pay them each month and choose not to see any movies. Good luck with that.
I get your point, but nobody complains about AMC's competing Stubs A-List offering. It allows you to see 3 movies a week and costs $19.95 a month. No restrictions on what you see or when you see it, but it must be at an AMC theater. I don't see anybody saying AMC is going to go under from this. In fact, it may be profitable for Movie Pass at the $9.95 rate or maybe they lose so little money that their selling of subscriber, info, which apparently is the real key to their business model, can actually make them a modest profit now with the lower costs.
My e-mail is currently Outlook and it uses Exchange. If I want to replace Outlook I need whatever I use to also be able to connect to Exchange.
I used to use Thunderbird, but no longer do. Basically I got with my current employer because they (Fortune 500 company) bought out my previous employer. For a few years they left us alone and we managed our own email and I used Thunderbird. Still miss Thunderbird. It was awesome. Outlook is not awesome. It's better than Lotus Notes, but what isn't? Here's a problem you may have. In theory I could make Thunderbird connect to our Exchange server, but the problem is that to set it up, it requires some information about the Exchange server that I don't know and can't get because I don't have a need to know. Also, our company uses Calendar a lot and I don't know a way to make Thunderbird handle that correctly from Exchange. Sadly, it's accurate to say here that if you have to ask, you won't be able to make it work.
First this is OLD NEWS this happened a month or so ago i switched back to 5.44 and denied CCleaner internet access and i manually check for updates Their hasn't been any since the first broke news.. wtf is going on here at /. anymore? news that really matters doesn't show for weeks after?
Wait probably 3-4 days for this whole story to be resubmitted as brand new. I'm not kidding. And don't be shocked if it only takes 2 days for it happen.
At least this resubmission could be useful. We also tend to get submissions where the submitter lacks good reading skills. For example, someone will say something like "Not X. Definitely not X. Whatever you are thinking it is, it's not X. It could be anything else but it never was and never will be X." Then the submitter will say "They said it's X! They said it's X!"
I wonder if those judges have ever had second thoughts about their decisions, which resulted in taking away people's houses, based on possibly fraudulent statements by banks?
I'm not an attorney, but I have quite a few good friends who are attorneys. I can answer that for you. For most if not all - nope. They don't care if their decision screwed people over. One of the really bad things about attorneys in the USA is that there is a belief that goes with the job that the system is always right, even when the outcomes are wrong. Some crazy guy sues you unjustly and you have to wipe out your money to defend yourself from it? Lawyers would tell you that the system works. They don't care if it's abused as long as they get paid. And the number one dirty secret of the legal profession is that lawyers always get paid no matter what. In fact, cops will go out of their way to do all kinds of things to help lawyers get paid. If you owe a lawyer money and it goes unpaid long enough, cops are happy to show up at your door and start taking your stuff to sell to get money or to start seizing your paychecks. If someone owes you a big amount of money and won't pay it, good luck trying to get someone (judge, police) to care enough to do anything about it. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. But they always make sure that lawyers get paid. I have a friend whose wife went a little crazy and she divorced him. She quit her job to make sure she had no income coming in and hired one of her city's highest priced bulldog female divorce lawyers to represent her. Didn't pay a dime to the lawyer but ran up over $30,000 in legal fees. Her lawyer sued the husband for the entire cost and a sympathetic judge made him pay it. This is why I say that lawyers always get paid. Think about it - a lawyer took a case knowing her client wouldn't pay her because she also knew the system would let her collect from the estranged husband. So no, I can assure you that the vast majority of the judges, if not every single one of them, don't care at all.
What's to stop one person from signing up legitimately and then giving copies of the browser to others who did not register? Does the browser check IDs? If so, does that slow it down? We've got people here in the USA who don't want to be identified for anything, so yeah, not real surprised that some people were threatened by this and got that point across. On the other hand, I was almost thinking that all the dumb "solutions in search of a problem" ideas for companies had surely been taken by now. but I am wrong about that.
What are the costs to rewrite the water-billing software, payroll software, work order system, etc, and then integrate them all together?
Probably not very much if the original systems are properly documented so you have a clear idea of what you are doing, and plenty of test data. Plus your hardware costs would probably be 1/4 what they are at present, so you could factor this as part of your "rolling upgrade plan" -you do have plans for a rolling upgrade, don't you?
Systems won't be documented. Whatever 3rd party wrote them will make sure of that so the government will have to pay them for any future changes. And you could knock me over with a feather if what apparently is something like a county government has any plans for a "rolling upgrade" in the future. Their plan is to keep using old systems until they fall apart and they have to buy new ones.
How many Linux gurus are willing to take the pay cut to work at the same rate as a Windows guru? Since they are probably 4 times as productive (ie believe the statistic is more like 10 times) none would need to.
You clearly have no idea how costly it is to keep a pile of shit like Windows on the road, even without malware problems.
In the old days, they used to say "Nobody got fired for buying IBM". Now nobody gets fired for buying Windows. Plus, people know how to use Windows. You want to run Linux? Good luck getting a bunch of non-techies to get in board with reading email via anything but Outlook. I can assure you that governments don't care how much it costs to run Windows. Plus, for what it's worth, my previous employer tried to suck up to Microsoft (they gave us a pittance of their business, but they were a customer we had) and actually wrote and published a white paper "proving" that Windows was more cost effective than Linux, which was hilarious because the majority of our business actually ran on Linux. So you can say all you want that Linux is cheaper, but some pointy haired boss will have no problem finding various papers saying otherwise.
The more illegal aliens a state has, the higher the chances are that they will get more representatives after the next census.
The sun will also come up tomorrow. So what's your point?
For those who don't know, the US Constitution is silent on whether illegal aliens count in a census or not, mainly because when the document was written, there was no such thing as an illegal alien. You got on a ship, you came to the USA, they let you in. I'm not a lawyer so I can't cite specific cases, but basically the law is interpreted that you just count bodies in the census and you don't put people into groups of legal or illegal to determine how representatives are spread out in the US House of Representatives. And for those who don't know about that, the number of representatives is fixed at 435 and basically the more people you have living in your state, the more representatives you have for your state. No state can by law have fewer than 1 representative. California, the most populous state at present, currently has 53 representatives. Rhode Island and Vermont have 1 each. There may be a few more states with only one like maybe Wyoming and possibly one or both of the Dakotas.
Its pretty clear MoviePass is jsut a marketing firm looking to get picked up by a big company. They have no plan, no warchest, nothing. All everyone has to do is wait them out and they can pick it up for pennies on the dollar if they want it. MoviePass is done.
Well, it seems that they did have a plan. It just wasn't a very good one. Apparently the real plan was that they knew they would always lose money on the movie part of it, but they thought that the personal information that subscribers had to give up to buy the movie plan was worth so much money that they could make a fortune selling that information. That did not prove to be the case. Some stock market analysts have speculated that they may be able to turn a modest profit with these changes, but it probably depends on how many of their customers are super cheap and have a lot of spare time to spend at the movies. If a large number of subscribers are OK with waiting more than 2 weeks to see a film on the cheap, and/or very flexible about when they go, and/or willing to pay extra to see a film sooner than after 2 weeks, there is some chance they may be able to stop bleeding cash. There's also speculation that yet another massive reverse stock split is coming and all I can tell you is that reverse splits are a Hail Mary play (American football reference) to try to save a failing business. I've never heard of a company doing two of those and surviving.
The tech companies have made the decision that providing lunch is a bennie and it keeps people inside the bubble longer. If San Fransisco passes the "no cafeteria" regs, expect the corporate offices to rent food trucks on a rotation to stop in front of their office, seven days a week. The press on the local food establishments will be insane. People don't want to integrate into the community, they want to work and go home. Forcing them to go out for take out just annoys them.
Good point. They may also just bring their lunch rather than deal with the time necessary to go off campus and the prices necessary to do so. What are the local restaurants going to do then? Also, I've never seen anywhere where a mass produced lunch was just awesome all the time. It just can't be. Sure, maybe there are some things that the free lunch providers get right, but there's just no way it can be great all the time. And people are still choosing, for whatever reason, to eat the free lunch even when it's not all that good. If people are willing to eat crummy food just because it's free, that doesn't suggest to me that they'll be very excited to have to eat out and pay for it and will actually do what they can to not do that.
Who cares what the White House says? What does Taiwan have to say about it?
They're pretty upset in general. Just like any place, there are some small numbers of crazy people and in this particular case I would call people who actively want Taiwan to become part of China right now if not sooner by the term "crazy". But such people aren't in large numbers, but they do exist. I'd say they're maybe 1% of the population at most. Now, you do need to understand that similar to how in the USA the Republicans and Democrats have demonized each other, Taiwan has a similar situation where the "pan-green coaltion" of independence minded parties enjoys accusing the "pan-blue coalition" (mostly the KMT - the old Nationalist party of Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek) of wanting to surrender Taiwan to China ASAP. While there are probably a small number of KMT aligned people who do want that, as an outsider my opinion is that the vast majority of KMT members simply want Taiwan to survive as it is right now and to ensure that it does they are playing games with China in acting like reunification is their ultimate goal, but in reality they are actually just trying to keep Taiwan from being invaded.
I read the Taipei Times online and I have a good friend who lives in Taiwan that I happened to have talked to a few days ago. Taiwanese people in general are pretty upset at this constant and unending erosion of their space everywhere. Lots of companies have now changed their websites to outright say that Taiwan is part of China. Honestly, this whole thing reminds me a hell of a lot of the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia where the world turned a blind eye. Can anybody here list a recent similar situation where a democratic country/territory (the later is for the crazy pro-Beijing nuts who might be here) was threatened with takeover simply for being democratic? You see the Taiwan poses 2 threats to Beijing. Number one is that it shows that a democracy can work with Chinese people. One of China's secret arguments, one that even Jacky Chan has publicly supported, is that Chinese people can't be trusted with democracy and need to be told what to do. The other threat is that lack of control over Taiwan prevents China from stopping oil shipments to Japan, who it still essentially views as an enemy who still must pay for the crimes it committed in WWII. A recent Chinese military document talked about that being an ultimate goal of China after they take over Taiwan. I know the world wants to ignore this and hope it goes away, but it won't and I can assure you that it is being ignored at everybody's peril and it just sends a message to bad actors like Xi and Putin that nobody in the west will stand up for the little guy if the big guys threaten him.