Just like the did for lowering my credit card rates with Rachiel. Or the asshat foghorn cruise captain. Or how my vehicle warranty is expiring.
This isn't a hard problem to solve. Mandate the phone companies build in a star-spam sequence you can fire during (or right after) a call to have that caller marked as spamming, just like gmail. Get so many complaints, phone company hands you over to FTC for investigation. Phone company doesn't hand them over and then when the FTC does get them, the fine is double (triple? 10x? Whatever factor needed to make it hurt) whatever the revenue from the scam was.
Not rocket science. But as long as the phone companies profit from the scammers, you better believe this will continue to be a problem.
No consumer demand == over half a million ponied up by residents in a ~100k pop midwestern town as a downpayment on gigabit FTTP. There's no install date. There are RFPs that went out, and hopefully someone will be selected and we'll get fibre and I can tell comcast where to stick their cable.
Having a fairly common name and a early gmail where I snagged first initial + last name I get a lot of junk there. Password reset attempts aplenty, people's airline tickets, house listings, closing documents...
Those I want off of I send a nice mail to support at the company and claim fraudulent use of my email address to register with them. You'd be amazed how fast your email will be off their account (sometimes the account survives that, sometimes... the id10t gets to get a new account -- have fun with that!).
I don't know what is in the N900, but the current builds of Ubuntu are sluggish on a Galaxy Nexus (though nice and smooth on a Nexus 4). I would guess that means the N900 would be a slideshow.
Sure it exists, its called a Landscape subscription. Being able to manage both the desktops and smartphones/tablets for a company all through Landscape is actually kinda compelling. I know a lot of IT pros, since I used to be one before going back into programming and they universally hate hate hate iOS/Android/etc phones, because they is no good central management for them.
I'm sure for paid apps (on the desktop or phone or phone-desktop hybrid) Canonical gets a cut. The phone app store is much more a cultural norm than the desktop app store.
As a consumer, the idea that I could buy a phone with 64-128 Gb of flash and a quad to octo core cpu, 8 gigs of ram for under 500 within 5 years, which I could use with a cheap unlimited data plan (like t-mobile's $30/month 4G for the first 5gbyte and unlimited 3g after) and I could use it as a desktop or phone? Sign me up!
Because in 5 or 10 years, when that much less-new used car prices hit them, people like me may well buy a used Tesla (Roadster|S). Even with a half-dead battery pack it'd have more range than a leaf (which is plenty for midwestern small-city USA), cost less, and be a hell of a lot more fun to drive*.
*: Disclaimer: We (Wife and I) sat in a leaf when we were considering a second vehicle. Performance/range/etc don't matter when its uncomfortable to start with. I also sat in a Roadster when they took one on a tour to the Detroit auto show a few years ago and while it was... certainly not plush, it was not uncomfortable.
Why don't we start arming cops with some highly directional EMP weapons? If the computer is fried, that's a fine outcome. Power's off, car isn't going anywhere anymore. No more OJ chase scenes, just nuke his electronics (not from orbit) and be done with it.
I guess if you had a pacemaker that might not be so hot, but then again 125mph isn't really a healthy speed either.
Clearly we're solving the wrong problem with the keys and neutral.
As an aside, its a facinating place to visit. They had a pretty cool hands-on science exhibit center (which was sadly largely under rennovation when we were there -- late 2005).
It describes ISDN. In fact it is referenced by a later (1995) patent which mentions ISDN by name. Having actually used ISDN at one point for my network uplink it is pretty clear that's what it is talking about. (Well, maybe its that my dad wrote a bunch of the ISDN code for ATT/Bell Labs and when he heard I was getting ISDN I got details on how it works -- couldn't just go look it up in wikipedia back then!)
Unless your little OSS company produces an app which does something similar -- voice and data at once, its probably not going to be hard (but may be expensive) to defend yourself.
Because despite having fallen off contract, the sucker blogger wasn't bright enough to get off a contract plan and onto one of the various, usually cheaper, monthly plans.
Then if AT&T or any other provider dicks you around with your monthly (like T-mob is with their "no tethering on the unlimited data plan"), you can either 1) break the terms of the plan, because you can always go buy a new sim and top-up cards from a physical store and they can't track you and block your credit card or 2) jump to a different provider.
Sure there's the inconvenience of a new number, but that's what google voice and similar services are for.
That's fine, it means while your snake charmer is out sick someone else can come in and actually fix (rather than introduce new) bugs.
I've come in to real, live perl that glues together millions of dollars worth of data processing and it was not easy to understand and update. I didn't botch the changes I had to make, more thanks to good testing on my part than the quality and readability of the perl.
Good luck doing that when your perl wizard gets a pox on his house.
And Amazon has a comment system filled with vastly more morons, and the search and description of parts is horrible compared to newegg. Maybe worth it if you're buying something like a laptop, but if you're buying parts... newegg all the way. With the possible exceptoin of cases, because they are often so bloody heavy and expensive to ship, it can be cheaper to pick them up from the local computer shops instead -- assuming you have a good one.
I get that 15% restocking is annoying (like, when Asus tech support lied about their motherboard being VT-D capable, so I bought one and then ta-da it isn't! Bought an intel like I should have and was just going to craigslist 50% writeoff the other until it ended up being a new PC for the wife instead). That said in 8 years of buys from Newegg this is the first time -ever- I've thought about returning a part, and I've bought plenty from them -- both for myself and proxy via friends who also buy parts for new systems there.
Also, they aren't a patent troll (Amazon sure is) and didn't cave in to the patent troll (Amazon did). That's enough reason to buy from them by itself.
Speaking as an ex-state-employee who went private in the same town and got a >50% bump in salary (and has since received -gasp- raises over the cost of living, unlike the median 0% raise I got while with the state over 7 years), I wouldn't be inclined to question Kahn's claim. I have a number of friends in the same boat where leaving the state was a huge pay bump.
Just sayin'. Your average worker bee is paid very little by the state. It was part and parcel of the deal -- lower compensation, but great benefits.
I don't know that either Chicago or Kansas City is really far enough from the new madrid fault to be considered safe. Things aren't built to CA earthquake standards around here, even something small(ish) by the time it reaches Chicago is going to do serious amounts of damage. Not to mention there are faults a lot closer that they know next to nothing about (see the higher risk zone west of Aurora at: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/illinois/hazards.php) so the margin of error on them could be... large.
As earthquakes go, a 5.1 in Aurora isn't big, but it was felt all over: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/events/1909_05_26.php You make that a 6 or 7 because nobody really studies the fault system there and much of Chicago is going to be rubble.
Its potentially even more tragic if shutting it down ends up with the cell companies pushing through an elimination of the radio-quiet zone. The existence of said zone is probably a resource we won't be able to recover if it is lost.
100k deaths of coal miners by accident only in the US alone, 1900-2000 if you believe wikipedia. Excludes various exposure diseases (black lung), other environmental effects, and everything bad about burning it (radiation, ash/particulate matter, the whole CO2 problem).
Those nuke plants been slakin'. We need some bodies now. I think our only hope is that Fuka wakes Godzilla up and we count those under the death-by-nuke-plant statistic. I suppose you could toss in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that'd help some...
If you want to cook them from the inside out, why not just use a microwave?
Hint: if you haven't ever used a degausser, they can only operate for a limited time (due to internal resistance -> heating) and you wear the huge heavy gloves to hold the disk which will get what can be best described as "quite hot."
You don't need ikea level precision. A hand crafted, slightly imperfect, but stained and varnished bookshelf is far more pleasing to the eye than a wall of ikea crap. And it doesn't cost more if you consider that the bookshelf you build of real wood will probably still be usable 30, 60, or even 90 years and a few moves, while the ikea stuff will probably not survive the second move -- or maybe not even till the first. (or it could be my house has more books than the average... but our cookbook shelves in particular suffer greatly, but I haven't replaced them yet.)
There's a reason when I got a geekdesk it was frame only. 3/4 inch oak ply on top, stained a dark brown, coated with a nice thick protective layer of poly. Why pay >$100 for pressboard/laminate when I can make something far more beautiful (and sturdy -- the desk frame is going to give way long before you overload 3/4 inch ply without specifically trying to break the plywood) myself.
Friends considering lift desks have been asking how hard it is to make a surface like mine... (answer: not very, if you have a modicum of patience!)
AT&T was, in theory, building uverse out in my community (midwestern university town, >100k pop). That was two years ago. Not a peep since then. Supposedly a couple places have it, but I can't get it where I am. I'm stuck with comcast and their terrible network maintenance. They have a leak (classic sense: water infiltration) somewhere. Good soaking rain means 25%+ packet loss, multi-second ping times for a few days.
Of course by the time I'm through their "service" org far enough the central line techs would come out and look at it, things have dried up and they see no problem, so close the ticket and fix nothing.
Luckily we have a university/city sponsored FTTP service in the works -- probably WHY AT&T quit their uverse build out -- but at least I'll be able to get service that isn't comcast before I die/move out.
Those who froget the past are doomed to repeat it: Asheron's call had a similar issue back in 99-2000 era.
Just like the did for lowering my credit card rates with Rachiel. Or the asshat foghorn cruise captain. Or how my vehicle warranty is expiring.
This isn't a hard problem to solve. Mandate the phone companies build in a star-spam sequence you can fire during (or right after) a call to have that caller marked as spamming, just like gmail. Get so many complaints, phone company hands you over to FTC for investigation. Phone company doesn't hand them over and then when the FTC does get them, the fine is double (triple? 10x? Whatever factor needed to make it hurt) whatever the revenue from the scam was.
Not rocket science. But as long as the phone companies profit from the scammers, you better believe this will continue to be a problem.
I'm bemused the assumption is the engineer is an idiot, not the reporter or marketdroid that wrote it.
No consumer demand == over half a million ponied up by residents in a ~100k pop midwestern town as a downpayment on gigabit FTTP. There's no install date. There are RFPs that went out, and hopefully someone will be selected and we'll get fibre and I can tell comcast where to stick their cable.
Having a fairly common name and a early gmail where I snagged first initial + last name I get a lot of junk there. Password reset attempts aplenty, people's airline tickets, house listings, closing documents...
Those I want off of I send a nice mail to support at the company and claim fraudulent use of my email address to register with them. You'd be amazed how fast your email will be off their account (sometimes the account survives that, sometimes... the id10t gets to get a new account -- have fun with that!).
I don't know what is in the N900, but the current builds of Ubuntu are sluggish on a Galaxy Nexus (though nice and smooth on a Nexus 4). I would guess that means the N900 would be a slideshow.
Sure it exists, its called a Landscape subscription. Being able to manage both the desktops and smartphones/tablets for a company all through Landscape is actually kinda compelling. I know a lot of IT pros, since I used to be one before going back into programming and they universally hate hate hate iOS/Android/etc phones, because they is no good central management for them.
I'm sure for paid apps (on the desktop or phone or phone-desktop hybrid) Canonical gets a cut. The phone app store is much more a cultural norm than the desktop app store.
As a consumer, the idea that I could buy a phone with 64-128 Gb of flash and a quad to octo core cpu, 8 gigs of ram for under 500 within 5 years, which I could use with a cheap unlimited data plan (like t-mobile's $30/month 4G for the first 5gbyte and unlimited 3g after) and I could use it as a desktop or phone? Sign me up!
Isn't that the point of Wayland? Did you miss the memo?
Because in 5 or 10 years, when that much less-new used car prices hit them, people like me may well buy a used Tesla (Roadster|S). Even with a half-dead battery pack it'd have more range than a leaf (which is plenty for midwestern small-city USA), cost less, and be a hell of a lot more fun to drive*.
*: Disclaimer: We (Wife and I) sat in a leaf when we were considering a second vehicle. Performance/range/etc don't matter when its uncomfortable to start with. I also sat in a Roadster when they took one on a tour to the Detroit auto show a few years ago and while it was ... certainly not plush, it was not uncomfortable.
Why don't we start arming cops with some highly directional EMP weapons? If the computer is fried, that's a fine outcome. Power's off, car isn't going anywhere anymore. No more OJ chase scenes, just nuke his electronics (not from orbit) and be done with it.
I guess if you had a pacemaker that might not be so hot, but then again 125mph isn't really a healthy speed either.
Clearly we're solving the wrong problem with the keys and neutral.
As an aside, its a facinating place to visit. They had a pretty cool hands-on science exhibit center (which was sadly largely under rennovation when we were there -- late 2005).
Just remember to turn your cell off.
It describes ISDN. In fact it is referenced by a later (1995) patent which mentions ISDN by name. Having actually used ISDN at one point for my network uplink it is pretty clear that's what it is talking about. (Well, maybe its that my dad wrote a bunch of the ISDN code for ATT/Bell Labs and when he heard I was getting ISDN I got details on how it works -- couldn't just go look it up in wikipedia back then!)
Unless your little OSS company produces an app which does something similar -- voice and data at once, its probably not going to be hard (but may be expensive) to defend yourself.
Because despite having fallen off contract, the sucker blogger wasn't bright enough to get off a contract plan and onto one of the various, usually cheaper, monthly plans.
Then if AT&T or any other provider dicks you around with your monthly (like T-mob is with their "no tethering on the unlimited data plan"), you can either 1) break the terms of the plan, because you can always go buy a new sim and top-up cards from a physical store and they can't track you and block your credit card or 2) jump to a different provider.
Sure there's the inconvenience of a new number, but that's what google voice and similar services are for.
That's fine, it means while your snake charmer is out sick someone else can come in and actually fix (rather than introduce new) bugs.
I've come in to real, live perl that glues together millions of dollars worth of data processing and it was not easy to understand and update. I didn't botch the changes I had to make, more thanks to good testing on my part than the quality and readability of the perl.
Good luck doing that when your perl wizard gets a pox on his house.
And Amazon has a comment system filled with vastly more morons, and the search and description of parts is horrible compared to newegg. Maybe worth it if you're buying something like a laptop, but if you're buying parts... newegg all the way. With the possible exceptoin of cases, because they are often so bloody heavy and expensive to ship, it can be cheaper to pick them up from the local computer shops instead -- assuming you have a good one.
I get that 15% restocking is annoying (like, when Asus tech support lied about their motherboard being VT-D capable, so I bought one and then ta-da it isn't! Bought an intel like I should have and was just going to craigslist 50% writeoff the other until it ended up being a new PC for the wife instead). That said in 8 years of buys from Newegg this is the first time -ever- I've thought about returning a part, and I've bought plenty from them -- both for myself and proxy via friends who also buy parts for new systems there.
Also, they aren't a patent troll (Amazon sure is) and didn't cave in to the patent troll (Amazon did). That's enough reason to buy from them by itself.
Speaking as an ex-state-employee who went private in the same town and got a >50% bump in salary (and has since received -gasp- raises over the cost of living, unlike the median 0% raise I got while with the state over 7 years), I wouldn't be inclined to question Kahn's claim. I have a number of friends in the same boat where leaving the state was a huge pay bump.
Just sayin'. Your average worker bee is paid very little by the state. It was part and parcel of the deal -- lower compensation, but great benefits.
Detection is the arms race. Tell me, who has really won the other arms race, the virus writers or the AV vendors?
I'd vote for civ, but I have to finish one more turn first.
See also: XCom.
Taint Wars 2. Better hope it keeps being popular in Asia, lest NCSoft get all Auto Assault/City of Heroes/Tabula Rasa on your game.
I don't know that either Chicago or Kansas City is really far enough from the new madrid fault to be considered safe. Things aren't built to CA earthquake standards around here, even something small(ish) by the time it reaches Chicago is going to do serious amounts of damage. Not to mention there are faults a lot closer that they know next to nothing about (see the higher risk zone west of Aurora at: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/illinois/hazards.php) so the margin of error on them could be ... large.
As earthquakes go, a 5.1 in Aurora isn't big, but it was felt all over: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/events/1909_05_26.php You make that a 6 or 7 because nobody really studies the fault system there and much of Chicago is going to be rubble.
Its potentially even more tragic if shutting it down ends up with the cell companies pushing through an elimination of the radio-quiet zone. The existence of said zone is probably a resource we won't be able to recover if it is lost.
100k deaths of coal miners by accident only in the US alone, 1900-2000 if you believe wikipedia. Excludes various exposure diseases (black lung), other environmental effects, and everything bad about burning it (radiation, ash/particulate matter, the whole CO2 problem).
Those nuke plants been slakin'. We need some bodies now. I think our only hope is that Fuka wakes Godzilla up and we count those under the death-by-nuke-plant statistic. I suppose you could toss in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that'd help some...
If you want to cook them from the inside out, why not just use a microwave?
Hint: if you haven't ever used a degausser, they can only operate for a limited time (due to internal resistance -> heating) and you wear the huge heavy gloves to hold the disk which will get what can be best described as "quite hot."
You don't need ikea level precision. A hand crafted, slightly imperfect, but stained and varnished bookshelf is far more pleasing to the eye than a wall of ikea crap. And it doesn't cost more if you consider that the bookshelf you build of real wood will probably still be usable 30, 60, or even 90 years and a few moves, while the ikea stuff will probably not survive the second move -- or maybe not even till the first. (or it could be my house has more books than the average... but our cookbook shelves in particular suffer greatly, but I haven't replaced them yet.)
There's a reason when I got a geekdesk it was frame only. 3/4 inch oak ply on top, stained a dark brown, coated with a nice thick protective layer of poly. Why pay >$100 for pressboard/laminate when I can make something far more beautiful (and sturdy -- the desk frame is going to give way long before you overload 3/4 inch ply without specifically trying to break the plywood) myself.
Friends considering lift desks have been asking how hard it is to make a surface like mine... (answer: not very, if you have a modicum of patience!)
AT&T was, in theory, building uverse out in my community (midwestern university town, >100k pop). That was two years ago. Not a peep since then. Supposedly a couple places have it, but I can't get it where I am. I'm stuck with comcast and their terrible network maintenance. They have a leak (classic sense: water infiltration) somewhere. Good soaking rain means 25%+ packet loss, multi-second ping times for a few days.
Of course by the time I'm through their "service" org far enough the central line techs would come out and look at it, things have dried up and they see no problem, so close the ticket and fix nothing.
Luckily we have a university/city sponsored FTTP service in the works -- probably WHY AT&T quit their uverse build out -- but at least I'll be able to get service that isn't comcast before I die/move out.