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Signed. This now needs around 90,000 more signatures for the White House to address it. Edit: To the "this won't help" crowd, while I might agree with you normally, the fact that there are corporations on both sides of this thing makes visibility more functional than usual. Thanks to that Princeton study, we have confirmation that the US is an oligarchy and that the government in no way takes public opinion into account. They do, however, take corporate opinion into account. I want Netflix, Firefox, and other corporations in favor of neutrality to see that there is significant public support and that pumping their own lobbyist dollars into the equation wouldn't be a waste of time. If successful, this petition can help in that direction.
Is there a tangible difference between Democrats and Republicans? Sure in theory they have some disagreements over abortion, social security, same sex marriage and other topics that rarely come up outside of election speeches, but when it comes to funding wars, keeping the poor and middle classes oppressed and allowing the highest bidders to buy their way into legislation that benefits them, is there a big difference? Obama, Bush, Clinton and Bush Sr. belonged to both dominent parties here, but their policies weren't hugely different from one another, at least not in regards to corporations being favored heavily by them. [President Clinton signed the telecommunications act of 1996 that opened the flood gates for further deregulation]( And he was a democrat. My point is, both sides act pretty identically on big issues like this.
Defenders of the merger have argued that it won't reduce competition because Comcast and Time Warner don't serve the same customers. This is one of the things that kills me. "They have monopolies in their respective regions, so we should let them merge!" This type of defense actually highlights one of the major issues with Comcast and TWC.
If Comcast is so bad, why the fuck are you people using it? See, back in the day, true Americans let a company know when it sucked. Know how? They quit giving their fucking money to it. Solution? Get rid of the internet. You don't need it. I promise you won't die without internet. I promise.
It's heart braking to see how blatantly and cheaply these people whore themselves out for too. What's more heartbreaking is that this isn't against the law. In the mean time some girl gets sentenced for "assaulting an officer" when the cops are sicced onto people protesting this sort of thing.
This isn't really entirely accurate. ISPs aren't trying to just slow down internet, there's really no benefit for them on that end, and the "little pipes" aren't really a big deal for the ISPs. The problem is when Netflix tries to send 60% of the internet's total bandwith through a "big pipe", and now the ISP is basically just a netflix provider. What they're trying to do to limit something like Netflix, is make netflix pay more money to deal with the upkeep they create, since the ISP is basically just a middleman to get netflix to the end user. The other problem is that now the ISP wants to say "Here's our basic internet package, but you want netflix? that will cost more. Youtube? little bit more" kinda like how you can subscribe to basic cable, but things like HBO will cost you extra. The ISP cashes in on both sides of the transaction, and the internet becomes a worse place for everyone. This doesn't mean slower internet, as the video implies, just a more restricted internet sorry for wall of text, had to be corrected. i guess
I wish these smarmy articles would at least mention why the laws are being created. Yes I disagree with the law. But I like to hear the argument in favor of the law, and then decide for myself. And it would be helpful if entities like BGR and Arstechnica pretended to have some journalistic standards and at least present the position of the other side. Their editorials can continue to be condescending and insulting - after they present the other side fairly.
Statistically speaking, there was a 75%+ chance he would die soon anyway even with treatment. As a medical student, I saw a number of Whipple procedures. They are awful. If someone chose death instead, that is not a "big fuckup" it could easily be the best choice for most people. I have watched too many people die in the hospital instead of at home to think that treatment is the right choice for everyone.
This (Shellshock) is a big fucking deal. Remember Heartbleed? Shellshock is worse then that. Heartbleed allowed an attacker to look at pseudorandom sections of memory with a specially crafted packet. Shellshock allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code with a specially crafted packet. The vulnerability happens because bash can define functions in environment variables, but when bash reads them it keeps executing code after the function definition. To exploit Shellshock all one needs to do is define a specially crafted environment variable in bash: a function definition plus a command to download and install your virus, for example. At first this doesn't seem like that big a deal since you need to be able to execute commands in bash to define environment variables - you could just execute your command directly. However many programs create environment variables from user input, including most web servers. The most obvious place to look is CGI scripts in bash, which aren't that common (and a really bad idea anyway). However the vulnerability is exploitable in any CGI script that invokes bash, so Python, Ruby and many other scripts are still vulnerable. There are also probably a huge number of other attacks that become possible with this vulnerability since it affects such a fundamental piece of your average webserver.
ITT: Arm chair conspiracy theorists bashing Apple more than FBI for no reason.
Which is why I wanted to see it, I know the transcript is out there, but there are many who don't read. Getting the video censored is a way to block content from the illiterate/
I fail to see any compelling evidence that says there should be a middle ground, Sorry, I stopped reading right there. If you can't find a middle ground then your opinion is already biased. If you can't even imagine what a common ground might look like then you're simply not able to comprehend logic, reason, or any of the countless statistics showing that simply having a gun in your house increases the chance that you will be shot with it.
This will probably get downvoted to hell except by a more mature audience but: This affects literally none of you. I hate saying this to people but you are very hypocritical. You are all very anti police, fuck the police, the government is trying to control our brains, etc etc yada yada yada. Lets say you are sitting in the Starbucks when a scenario arises where you are being held hostage. (Shady Starbucks you go to or something). Well now what? You have the ability to call 911 when the hostage taker isnt looking.. what do you do? You, like most logical people, should probably dial 911. But what I take from Reddit (I really should stop reading your posts) is that you don't need the police. Get your heads out of your asses people, technology is taking over and oh well. Fun part is, 99% of people who aren't doing anything harmful or bad won't get bothered by police. The police are not out to get you. They are normal humans who want to go home after their shift. When I was in France, soldiers (Yes, Army SOLDIERS) walked around with assault rifles (which I thought was cool) but all of my classmates on the study abroad were saying (HOLY FUCK WE ARE GOING TO DIE). Those soldiers are peacekeepers and if you have paid attention to the news lately, were probably very effective in keeping the populace a bit calmer in Paris recently. (Je Suis Charlie)
There is an amount of horrible misunderstanding by people. They use the words: > broadband companies should treat all Internet traffic equally carelessly. If that were the wording, it would be very bad. Even [The Oatmeal's comic on Net Neutrality]( mixes up two very different concepts: > all information must be treated equally and later he (unknowingly) gets it right: > all data, regardless of origin, must be treated equally For those of you who don't know, the difference between these two phrasings is huge , and can lead to bad things if lawmakers carelessly use the first phrasing. What you want to do is: stop companies from favoring content from origins that paid them more money or slowing down content from origins they don't like or demanding some extra cash from an IP that saturating their network with traffic You want them to be origin neutral. What you don't want is to be traffic neutral. There is a concept that has existed in the TCP protocol since its inception, it is the idea that some packets are important, or not important: a voip packets needs to be delivered in 10ms-150ms an e-mail packet can be delivered in hundreds or thousands of milliseconds This idea of packet priority was even baked into the TCP protocol, having a priority flag. In 1998 it was redesigned as a [ Differentiated services ]( The idea is that there are different kinds of packets that necessarily have different priority on the Internet. This requires everyone to play nicely, but it is a feature used on LANs and WANs already. The TCP protocol defines priority code points : Class 1 (lowest priority) Class 2 Class 3 Class 4 (highest priority) Low Drop AF11 AF21 AF31 AF41 Med Drop | AF12 | AF22 | AF32 | AF42 | High Drop | AF13 | AF23 | AF33 | AF43 | Almost no software (yet) supports declaring their Assured Forwarding priority. A typical priority ordering might be: ICMP/IGMP DNS lookups VoiP (including Skype voice) interactive shell session real-time gaming video conferencing video interactive web-browsing - small packets (html, javascript, css) interactive web-browsing - large packets (images) interactive web-browsing - large packets (streaming video) file download POP3 (e-mail pickup) SMTP (e-mail send) background (non-interactive) downloads (e.g. Steam, Torrent, WoW content download) torrent seeding You would not like it if it took 6,000 ms for a page of text to load, simply because we blindly followed the rule that all traffic must be treated equally. You want to be able to surf reddit, while seeding your torrents. Nearly every good router implements some form of [ Traffic Shaping ]( in order to make the Internet work they way you want it. They go to great lengths to try to identify traffic, and classify it into priority queues. From Cisco and Juniper Networks, down to DD-WRT, Tomato and Linksys, and OpenBSD PC based routers, they all do traffic shaping to make the web work good. And ISPs try to do a lot of this grunt work for us; so we can browse the internet, while watching a streaming Netflix video.
So long as we get Title II, and the FCC is willing and able to make decisions that affect change for the better both now and in the future , I have no problem whatsoever with a loophole here and there. Why? Because, so long as the FCC does it's job correctly , and continues to be able to do it's job, they can always close those loopholes if they get abused in the future. What I'm really scared of is fucking republicans and corporate-bought democrats gutting the FCC's ability to protect consumers (me) from the ISPs (the enemy from my perspective), not just because I get fucked in the foreseeable future, but because it would also prevent them from protecting ISPs from consumers should the tables ever be turned.
This is a huge issue in the states. AFAIK the issue lays with subsidies. As long as a carrier sells you a device, and not the OEM, then you have all kinds of examples. T-Mobile only supports Wi-Fi calling on their devices for example, but you have to wait for updates to the OS, and you may have default functionality disabled (like the FM radio) because the carrier doesn't want it.
True story: One of my friends got a "new" used computer from a different friend. I didn't have a windows disk, so I helped him install Ubuntu until I got my windows disk back from someone else. 2 weeks later, I got my disk back but he said that he wanted to stay with Ubuntu. Every so often he would email me with a question. I would in turn do a search on Ubuntu Forums, and show him the answer. Then he figured out how to search Ubuntu Forums on his own, and ask his own questions when he couldn't find the question already asked.
Hmm. My father works for them. My father is a hoarder of types. He has thousands and thousands of old papers and junk and shit. Most of it's stuff with his properties because he's a landlord on the side. Anyways, one day I am visiting him and I'm giving him shit about all his papers and shit and I am looking through it all saying, "Why do you need this dad?" He has old newspapers from the 80's because he wants to check the classified for a good deal (WTF?!). I am going through the papers, and I stumble upon a folder and on the tab it says "Project Iron Monkey. CONFIDENTIAL." I say, "What's this dad," and he hurriedly grabs the folder from me. "Oh! That's from work... If I let you see it I'd have to kill you," and then he laughed. I shrugged it off, but it always intrigued me. I mean this guy worked at NORAD, and I have seen all the shit they got in there before they shut it down after 9/11. Anyways, I don't know if he was working on this Iron (monk)Key or not. He says he sits in a big room with a couple other people watch a million big screens that are identifying the heat signatures of missles being launched, so that the can take preventative action.
It may not be malicious intent, but it's certainly malicious ambivalence. The goal of driving down prices has made it almost impossible to find quality products in today's major retail stores. Whether it's screw drivers at wal-mart, blenders at target, or tomatoes at kroger, the deplorable quality of these items makes them almost not worth buying. You must go to specialty stores or order online to find quality, long lasting products. I think people are starting to realize this. People are starting to save recipts for all major purchases. 30 years ago if you bought a cheap blender it would last decades. Today it won't last your college career. I don't know how you could say it's desirable either. Clearly the economies that are still making QUALITY products are doing alright (GERMANY), while the ones devoted to pumping out cheap bric-a-brac are failing or growing very slow (USA-CHINA). It maybe good for ONE specific company or consumer to replace their apple Ipod or Lawn Mower every 3 years, but on a grand scale that is an AWFUL lot of wasted resources, time, and money that could be better invested some where else. Believe me though about the lawn mower. I worked in the wal-mart garden center last summer. Half the lawn mowers were returned by the end of the season, broken.
The best way to get started is to make friends with a good bike shop. Seriously. As with any other job, your biggest advantage is going to come from knowing the staff and being friendly with the boss. They'll be much more likely to help you out as you work on the other important part: learning by doing. Take stuff apart. Preferably your stuff. Don't try to reinvent it. Just take your bike apart, clean it, lubricate it, and reassemble it. Ask for help with getting the right tools. You're both demonstrating interest and self-starting here. You will likely screw something up too badly to fix, so this is where you'll want help from your friends at the shop. You'll learn where to stop and ask questions, or to realize that you can't fake the right tool for the job. Finally, you really, truly have to have a "knack." There are people who get it, learn it naturally, and can intrinsically understand a mechanical device that they may not have taken apart yet. There are also people who, while passionate, lack the intrinsic ability. Accept that you may or may not be a natural at this, but don't let that stop you from learning!
Google makes us smarter, no question. It gives us access to more information than we've ever imagined. The hard part is discerning between good information and bad information. There will always be idiots that rely on google for everything, but as a programmer I've come to the conclusion that even smart people rely on google regularly. Whether it's fix obscure issues, to research a technology, to learn something new or to watch cute kittens the internet helps foster innovation which helps us progress as a society.
Again, you seem to be talking as though I made that up out of thin air. And secondly you seem completely unaware of what a firewall is. Go look up the research. I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't though, since you sound like an uneducated twat.
My wife just finished law school, and essentially: ANYTHING can be used against you in court. Once you're suspected of a crime, with reasonable suspicion, a judge can order subpoenas to collect "evidence" from any source they can think of, which can (and probably will) include ANY ELECTRONIC DEVICE YOU'VE EVER USED.
Please never say something is impossible just because you don't think it can be done. A wireless backbone mesh would be possible with the correct advances in technology. Increases in computing speed would make cryptography not that much of an issue (it already isn't that much of an issue.) Improvements in wireless technology allowing it to reach new speeds, whether through refinements on existing technology or through the application of new frequency ranges would allow for faster communication and reduce latency. Assuming wireless switches operate as fast as wired switches in the future the latency issues would be nearly the same as with wired, radio waves travel just as fast as electronic signals in wires. The easiest way to solve most of these issues is with a high speed, low latency satellite network with land based extensions for a secondary backbone in case of whoever owns the satellites fucking up the network. As for not sticking it in an iphone, most of the technology for doing this is already present in an iphone. In a couple generations an iphone could conceivably decrypt aes256 in real time with no issues whatsoever.
Ok I understand that you know more about this than me and probably have a better grasp on the situation. However please don't use the word impossible. It makes it seem that you believe the situation to be completely and utterly not possible to occur, not that current understanding leads us to believe that it is most unlikely. Impossible in my mind implies that it has been proven to not be possible, not that it is highly unlikely.
thats an inaccurate statement. Neither the present CEO nor the former CEO have a MBA degrees. The main requirement to run a company is NOT to have deep technical knowledge.A have a high-level birdseyeview level knowledge would suffice. What is essential is to know indepth, as well as overview , and with utmost clarity , the day-to-day operations and functioning of the company, as well as ability to know your strenghs and bolster your place in the market based on the strength.
You're both half-wrong and half-right. Gaining root access does not instantly grant you the ability to install a different OS. It all comes down to the state of the bootloader. If the bootloader is locked (meaning it will only boot specially signed kernels), then the best you can do with root is replace the system files. This lets you tweak and modify the existing ROM, but it DOESN'T mean you could replace Android with Ubuntu, as this would require replacing the kernel. It depends on the hardware, not the software. A good deal of devices running Android have unlockable (or crackable) bootloaders, but still a good deal don't. If you're interested in running different OSes, do your research to see what's available on the particular device.
on a bathroom break, the prime minister struck up a conversation with the man at the next urinal, believing the stranger was an I.O.C. member. Blair asked the man how he was doing and what he was up to that night, chattering suavely until finally the man, who showed no sign of recognizing Blair, apparently concluded that the prime minister was hitting on him, zipped up his fly, blurted in disgust, “Why are you asking me these questions?”—and bolted.
I really loved the
lolk, that would take an agency as large as the DMV on a Federal level. Still doesn't stop me from getting a VPS in the Ukraine, setting it up as a seedbox and pulling all my content over SSH. Attempting to control the contents of every encrypted Internet connection is a laughable notion. Once you ban vpn's people switch to various other types of encrypted tunneling technology. Eventually it would require that all encrypted connections were somehow proxied through some "trusted" watchdog agency (which wouldn't stop people from establishing their own rogue encrypted tunnels anyway). This notion is entirely unfeasable. All e-commerce and everything from simple website logins are protected by encrypted tunnels. It would be trivial to use an http over ssl proxy for torrenting and would appear to traffic analysis to be something like video streaming over SSL.
The number of completely inappropriate analogies used in this article boggles the mind. EG the immune system isn't a security system or a virus scanner, though it might be seen as that sometimes. Overall it maintains homeostasis of the body's ecology. Right now we can do this by simply having read only virtual machine images and strong, locally encrypted volumes for saving data. If you want to save something to another location encryption and decryption should probably still be handled locally. How is it homeostasis you ask? Well, computers have this magical ability to save and return to a specific state, so long as the storage of the state is not disrupted then they can always return. This is precisely what homeostasis seeks to achieve in a system that cannot store such well defined states. Fundamentally this is the property we want from computer security. We also want computers to store changes in their state, for example a document we have been working on or code implementing new functionality. Good review processes for incorporating code into the saved state is where the current system breaks down. It will ALWAYS break down there, if you allow people to modify the base state of the system then there is always a security risk. For editing documents it is a bit different because we want to ensure the privacy of those documents. That privacy is not a function of 'homeostatic' computing, but is a feature we would like it to reliably implement. In the face of a changing ecosystem surrounding the base state, what once might have reliably implemented certain security features will no longer be able to do so. Thus we must modify the base state. Thus we encounter the problem of allow the base state to be modified. Does anyone see a way around this problem?
I feel your pain. I live not that far out of a decently sized city, but until a couple years ago was stuck with dial up (not even decent dial up, it ran at ~3-4k). Then we managed to find a company that offered DSL in our area, signed a contract, everything was looking good until the service tech showed up and told us that we weren't supposed to be able to get it since we are outside of the range of the nearest hub by about a .25-.5 miles. We got ahold of the company, and they agreed to honor the contract and hook us up, even though they could make no guarantees about the speed. Turns out it is actually pretty good compared to what we were able to get before, and now the speed caps out at around 40k, though it usually runs at a blazing ~20k. We have had a lot of trouble with it though, but not because of the provider. Because of AT&T. They do the phones around here, and their service techs screw up our internet every time they come out (which is quite often, if there's a power outage or phone line down within 100 miles it seems like we lose power or service) to the point that the internet provider has told us that if they can't come out again, because we've had too many service calls. Practically everyone in our area has tried satellite, and the service is spotty at best. To top it off, our house is in a dead zone for cell phones, so getting one of the wifi adapters that goes over a cell tower isn't even an option. When I had gone to college, none of my friends believed me that checking email/facebook/etc was an hour+ long task. I feel bad using adblock on sites that I actually like and want to support, but they would be un-browsable without it.
Apparently you have no fucking clue what a database is do you? You are wiping the data in the DB not the DB or the Table. It's not a preference file. I love it when people get on their high horses when they don't know what they are talking about.
A comment on the site: "This is an astoundingly bad article. It's already been pretty much eviscerated over at techdirt: It also operates within a series of bizarre platitudes, my favorite of which is the allegation that copyright law is what ensures that art maintains a society with a free culture. This is an astounding thing to say, because, first, we do not have a free culture; since the free market tends to drown unpopular or unexplored modes of impression. Second, many artists and a whole buncha scientists still essentially rely on patronage, especially in areas the free market tends not to elevate, a good example of this is, literally, all government grants. Finally, as anyone with any understanding of history, or culture, or any field tangentially related to not-trying-to-sell-a-shitty-book-ology, the system of private patronage is no longer the preeminent mode of cultural development due to the exponential and unprecedented growth in population and economy, and its corresponding social development and political movements, which is commonly placed under the umbrella term "the industrial revolution." A movement which arguably post-dated copyright, and certainly wasn't started by it. It wasn't until the oppressive Victorian era in England that copyright was taken seriously. And even later in the United States. Benjamin Franklin, actually constantly violated copyright law (and generally straight made shit up, see the key and the kite thing) and sold reprinted versions of books without remuneration. It was Wordsworth, Romanticism's most celebrated buzz-kill, who complained the most about this American practice most, and Dickens, who, already just super fucking rich and famous but was pathological in his fear of poverty, lobbied congress to protect British works. Congress didn't do this because Americans were coming late to the game on the literacy thing and American publishers probably wouldn't have been able to take the hit. Dickens was as rigid about the issue as his prose, and may have single-handedly fathered the American stereotype that the British kind of suck. But don't take my word for it. More informed people talk about shit like this all the time: here's a paper (made freely available, I might add) from Georgtown Law, Creativity and Culture in Copyright Theory, that discusses some of the more blatant flaws in copyright theory: My personal favorite line is, "theorists offer no particular reason to think that marketable bypro ducts are either an appropriate proxy or an effective stimulus for creativity (as opposed to production), and more typically refuse to engage the question."
There's just one problem, idiots are signing this based on the title only. Solution: Reddit styled
In this way they actually seem a lot like gold. The inflation of gold is checked because there is only so much in the ground. The inflation of bitcoin is checked because there are only so many bitcoins to be had. Now the proof of inflation resistance is more compelling in the case of bitcoin. Its always possible that we could find a massive untapped gold reserve. But as a practical matter this is unlikely to happen to either currency. Also bitcoin has many advantages above and beyond gold, especially that it is so much easier to securely store and exchange.
You're a fucking dumbass. EDIT: Yes, it takes quite a bit of work for banks and government to reorganise their entire banking system as the second largest bank in Cyprus is being closed down. The money is locked up to prevent tax evader to move their money to another tax haven before their money is taxed to recapitalise the largest bank in Cyprus.
Currently the markets are still very cyclic for those hip to notice trends, but as times passes as the market expands with more bitcoin users, it will become volatile. But within tighter constraints on the upper and lower bounds of any variation causing any kind of arbitrage to be marginal in profit at best...
I have nothing to prove in this 'discussion' of ours, and hence no reason to provide direct evidence of anything (let alone Canada's foray into digital currencies). A discussion is a conversation in hopes of an exchange of ideas, you gave me your idea: That you think digital currencies in the future is laughable. And I gave you my thought on the subject, namely that Canada is dipping it's toe in the water. I even provided a link, something you failed to do in your idea, to a tech blog that linked to their website, a video they have, and a story by Reuters, as well as a short summery. More than enough direct evidence but two clicks away. When you asked for a source I said google it as a way of saying, I don't know or care; find out for yourself. Even more evidence but two clicks way. We are not in a debate, I am not trying to prove anything, and you do not live in a privileged reference frame. I will not supplement your laziness to click on a link, read (or at least skim!) what it says, and then click on another link if the evidence there is not enough for you. I've provided more than enough evidence of my thought (Canada is trying a digital currency) when it really didn't even need any, all you have provided is a baseless 'LOL!'.
Okay. I'll break the cost down into three parts. There are three major parts here. Connections between the ISP and other ISPs, long-run connections between cities (for the ISP's network), and connections from their base from the city to your home (or, in the case of cable, to a node first). Tier 2/3 ISPs have to pay money to connect to (peer with) other ISPs. It can cost anywhere from $0.50 to $3 per megabit to purchase these interconnects, HOWEVER, some tier 2 ISPs are large enough that they only have to pay to peer with some of the ISPs they peer with. Depending on the type of interconnect, you may get burstable capacity beyond the amount of bandwidth you pay for (like 1Gbps of bandwidth on 10Gbps), but we'll ignore that for the sake of simplicity. Tier 1 ISPs are extremely large ISPs whose networks are so large that they can get peering for free (known as settlement-free peering). Speaking in terms of USA residential ISPs only, the ones that are tier one right now are AT&T and Verizon. So expense number one (if you're not tier 1) is the bandwidth. Expense number two is long-distance connections. These cost money to maintain and upgrade. Fiber got cut at 2AM? You'd better have enough extra capacity to handle the missing link's traffic, and a splicer better be on the scene quickly. Some residential ISPs have huge backbones, others don't. Tier 1 ISPs usually spend more here, tier 2 ones usually spend less. While the fiber itself will last a long time, the equipment on both ends (routing equipment) will need to be upgraded periodically to improve network capacity. The third part is the last-mile network. This is where the massive costs start appearing. I'll explain how two common high-bandwidth types of networks work here. HFC (cable), and PON FTTH. I'll keep it simple, which may omit some details but will be easier to understand. HFC uses a hybrid network to deliver service. The provider runs fiber to many different nodes, and coax (coaxial cable) from the node on poles. To connect your house, an installer has to connect coax to the coax on poles, then connect the other end to your modem. Cable modems are pretty inexpensive, which makes it attractive to service providers. However, the nodes that feed these modems are fairly expensive. PON FTTH uses an all-fiber network to deliver service. Instead of feeding the nodes with fiber and running coax to the home, they feed the nodes with fiber and run fiber to your home. Unlike with cable, you can technically put the nodes at the ISP's building and run fiber directly to people, but either way works. The whole concept of nodes isn't exactly the same, it usually involves splitters... But that isn't important. To connect a house, you have to run fiber to an ONT (optical network terminal) located on/in the house. FTTH has costs that are dropping. For new construction, it's starting to become comparable to cable or DSL. The problem isn't new construction though, the problem is that the ISPs don't want to essentially pay for their entire infrastructure again when the existing one works fine. So that should explain the issues with the last mile. Let's look at the bandwidth each solution offers. Both FTTH and cable can do quite high speeds if they have to. Current technology can do 100Gbps on fiber and 300Mbps on cable, but current technology that's realistically able to be deployed on a residential scale is capable of closer to 1Gbps/1Gbps on fiber (lower and asynchronous in the case of GPON), and 300Mbps/100Mbps on cable (much lower in the case of DOCSIS 2.0). So now that you have a rough idea of how all this works, let's take a look at why it costs money to give your customers more bandwidth. The first two components I described will always end up costing more when you give your customers more bandwidth. If you're tier 2/3, you'll end up paying slightly more for bandwidth, and may end up having to upgrade your network. If you're tier 1, you'll have to invest in your backbone. Now those costs aren't a huge deal. But what is a huge deal is the last-mile. Let's take a hypothetical situation involving a cable provider who has an existing DOCSIS 3.0 infrastructure and offers 50Mbps service. If they wanted to provide 100Mbps, load on their network would increase (not quite double on the average, but max speeds probably would). If they weren't careful about node loading, this would mean that a lot of their nodes would be overloaded. Why would the nodes be overloaded? Usually, it's because they put too many people on the node. To fix this, they either need to split the node (add a second one), or upgrade it (replace it). This will cost a great deal of money. Now over time, this ISP periodically replaces and upgrades their nodes, but an instant doubling of speed would require massive investments in their infrastructure without being able to spread it out over a long period of time. After a while of periodic upgrading, ISPs do end up with enough spare capacity to increase speeds, and most of them do. Mediacom increased speeds on some tiers in 2012, as did Comcast, Verizon, and probably other ISPs. Now could your local cable company give you 300Mbps? Yes. But it would cost them a great deal of money to do so, money that they'd rather spend on other things. With fiber, the situation is pretty similar. The infrastructure gets upgraded over time, etc. 1Gbps is the upper cap on that right now, but when XG-PON catches on you'll see 10Gbps as the upper cap. Speaking of infrastructure standards, cable also has an upcoming upgrade that'll allow operators to increase speeds further — DOCSIS 3.1 (which will allow cable operators to offer speeds of up to 10Gbps/1Gbps). HOWEVER, major infrastructure changes like moving from DOCSIS 3.0 to 3.1 and GPON to XG-PON are also very expensive for the ISP. They have to completely replace modems/ONTs as well as a sizable portion of their last mile network (nodes, etc).
So because I work for a fiber company and live in Provo I can't try to actually instill some real world knowledge into the people who are learning about this news from the outside? Check out the prices yourself [here]( and be the judge. In my opinion they are reasonable. In fact, they would probably be considered by most to be the best option you have compared to Comcast and Century Link who are the other two choices in Provo, UT. Do you think I have some hidden agenda or something? I am saying fiber is great, fiber is awesome! Provo has fiber. Now Provo has Google fiber whoop-de-doo. It really is not that big of a deal. I can understand the "BUT I WOULD LOVE FIBER SO MUCH OMG YOU ARE SO UNGRATEFUL" attitude. We already have fiber. There is no white knight swooping in to save us from perils of low bandwidth at high costs. I've had to explain IRL too many times how going from 10Mbps to 100Mbps is only useful if you are actually utilizing the 100Mbps. If the latency is the same and you only utilize say 50Mbps at your peak does it not make sense to pay for 60Mbps if it is cheaper? It is the same concept going from 100Mbps to 1000Mbps. Will a website load faster? no. Will your Pandora play faster? no. Will your facebook update quicker? no. Will Netflix be higher quality? no. People aren't going to use 1000Mbps, if they did it would crush the network. Google knows this, anyone in the industry knows this. Most people outside of the industry know this. This is Google looking into the future to get a fire lit under the major ISPs to help get the speeds in America where they should be. Higher bandwidth means more applications move to the cloud where Google is waiting. Veracity Networks is by no means a major ISP, nor trying to block the advancement of network technology. They have done nothing but increase the speeds on the fiber network since they acquired it. Look to the old Bell companies and Comcast / TimeWarner if you need to vent about the state of Americas network infrastructure.
Quite often they don't immigrate, they work and gain skills then go home. OK, but every day they're here, they're helping. And when they go home, they go to countries that trade with the US, and contribute to our GDP that way. > Also, with supply and demand, you've answered the question "How can we get people to do the work that we need done". Obviously the answer isn't "Pay an outrageously low salary then complain that we can't find anyone to do the work" because that answer ignores supply and demand. That obviously is the answer. Seems to work fine. > I'm sure it works out great for the company to get someone that basically can't quit for half the going wage though. They certainly can quit if they feel like it, 13th Amendment. Sometimes, they have to go home. There's disadvantages to quiting any job. > Of course the bigger problem is that for every H1-B that doesn't stay here, we lose out on experience. They don't live on Mars . They continue to contribute to the world economy. > The less experience permanent residents get the more companies can complain that they can't find someone to do the work because they are essentially artificially decreasing the number of skilled applicants. Yeah, that's the same reason oil companies hate oil wells: wells deprive them of an excuse to import oil. >
disclosure: Im half indian, half french/swiss) Highly accomplished people (doctors, lawyers) who are non-indian have flat out told me that technology is an immigrant job, and that I should do something respectable and get a law degree or mba. At first this sounds racist and edgy, but it makes sense. IT pay is awful, the work is difficult, and for all that you can get an mba or law degree at a decent school and make much more with greater stability and respect from the wider world. Although, I never got into other fields because I love technology. The H1-b program saves companies money out right but over the long term the poor code that gets written by these contractors probably cost more. I have seen awful code, not because the technical skill was lacking but because my foreign counterparts didnt get the communication right with their business teams and created in-optimal solutions. Also, I have dealt with outright fradulent contracters I mean they have faked every part of their resume. Since I am of indian decent (half technically) and I can speak broken/accented hindi (funny thing better than some Indian people I know, and I only had one parent to learn from) I can somewhat gain the trust of contractors. One contractor had been claiming he had 10 years of experience or something around that range. While having a lunch he drops this on me, he graduated uiversity 4 years ago. For those wondering, we work for a major financial firm and this guy was hired from TekSystems.
From the Facebook user agreement... "You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof."
I will be putting up large posters to spread the word in densely populated areas, as well as contributing my art to corporate buildings such as banks, Wal-Mart's, and charter schools. There are too many people who know little to nothing about what is going on. There are too many people that fear the law to disobey it. Wal-Mart and J.P. Morgan Chase will have no problem paying for some new paint. Someone will be paid to cover my art, so it will provide a job; as I will not be leaving ugly paragraphs of scrawled text on walls. If anyone would like a copy of the poster format, I would be more then happy to share. More people need to be doing proactive things to stop this, whether you work or not. I don't care if you have to wake up at five, and go tack up posters for an hour before work in the morning; If I can do it, you can too. Too many Americans are complacent about the things that our government is doing. Turkey rioted over a park demolition. A park. How many parks, and forests has the US shut down or logged? How many public schools will they shut down, and replace with charter schools? How many people have no idea of the effect that charter schools will have? Reddit has thousands of users, and if each one of you shared your opinion, and spoke up; telling them that "This is NOT ok with us." Then we CAN and WILL get something done. Screw the naysayers telling you to wait until "it" starts to participate. It needs to start somewhere, and I'll do it all myself if you wont help me. "I have to work tomorrow, maybe ill do it on the weekend." is just a bullshit excuse that you give yourself because you are lazy and complacent; If you have to contribute to your cause on your commute then do it. I ride the ferry nearly every day and it will be a great place to spread the word; as I will be ordering, printing, copying, and distributing thousands of posters. And as a note to the people who see almost everything: You will be judged for your actions. I do not fear you; for you are cowards, and cowards will never succeed.
That ruling isn't really in effect yet. What's really going on here is that in the past whenever a gag order case gets to the appeals stage, the government drops it and gives in to avoid bad precedent. This judge has ordered gag orders to stop nationwide, but probably doesn't have the authority to do so. However, the government can't refuse to appeal the case, because if they don't that won't matter, the order will still be in place. That means a 9th district appeals ruling on the constitutionality of gag orders in general, and of this specific gag order.
Absolutely. Switching from Google services to Mozilla (as I will be doing tonight. Sorry Google, love you, but I don't wanna play Skynet anymore) should be seen as a form of boycott, not a personal security measure. Although on the flip side, removing your activity from a directly-mirrored Google server is taking one link out of the chain; your ISP's dragnet is still going to gobble up everything you do, but you don't have to be sending your information through another PRISM honeypot by logging in to or using Google services.
You can't prove it, but you need a search engine to use the inernet these days, so you might as well use one which has staked its entire business on its privacy. When news comes out that Google is invading its users' privacy on a mass scale, people say "who cares?". Everyone already knew that, and continued using it with that knowledge. If news came out that DDG was doing the same thing, their business would be utterly destroyed, and I wouldn't be surprised if the founder - who is quite visible - was blackballed from the industry for that betrayal.
It's insane how just missing a day or week of school can totally derail you for the rest of your life. I probably missed less than 20 days my whole school career, but of the days that I missed I'm still very weak in the subjects that they covered that day/week. For example, I missed a few days in elementary school when we were going over decimals in math. When I finally came back a few days later, the teacher handed me a test, I of course failed it, and school moved on without me. Even today in Calculus II I have to be very careful and quadruple-check myself whenever I come up with a decimal approximation because I'm prone to round up incorrectly. This same scenerio can be applied to basically all of the other days I missed; for the most part, though, I was able to self-teach myself about this (and many other subjects from days I missed), but I definitely do still feel very unsure of myself whenever such a subject comes up (and my ego is further bruised by all of the tests I failed when I came back). Probably the most detrimental was when I missed a full week of school when we were really getting into the heart of the subject in my elementary English class. That week we were learning about nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and many other grammar-related things (basically, grammar in general). I still have no idea what those things are (other than a verb is "what you do" from those old commercials, and a noun is like a ... thing). I just throw words together and surprisingly they work with minimal grammatical errors, it seems like too much of an overtaking to try to try to learn that stuff now.
except that dealsbreaker is not alone, yeah some boycott callers are drama queens that will buy anyway but far from all. The problem is the gaming market is still growing so it seems the stoic don't exist. EA seem fine with that so far, mores the pity.
While I understand this thinking, the point is that fingerprint readers are more costly and difficult to implement. If they provide security that's actually worse than far simpler usernames and passwords, they shouldn't exist. Kirkland happens to be wrong about this. Kirkland actually makes a lot of mistakes in this article, the big one being: "How many fingerprints of yours are there on your laptop right now? As such, it's about as secret as your username. You don't leave your password on your spacebar, or on your beer bottle." Kirkland doesn't get that your actual fingerprint is NOT STORED ANYWHERE electronically. What is stored is a hash that represents 15 points on your finger, plus some gibberish. That last bit is key. When you're "enrolled" in the system you get the 15 points + random numbers. So if you deleted your account and hash, and re-enrolled, the hash would be different even though you're using the same finger.
Your actual fingerprint is not stored electronically in these systems. What is stored is a hash that represents 16 points on your finger, plus some gibberish. That last bit is key. When you're "enrolled" in the system you get the 16 points + random numbers. So if you deleted your account and hash, and re-enrolled, the hash would be different even though you're using the same finger.
I completely agree. It seems like people in this thread don't fully understand the implications of how Apple has implemented the feature. The initial reaction from most people here is that "its just a phone not a high tech / high security device." However the problem is that the iphone is a mass used device, it is not for a niche or obscure industry. When it comes to technology the initial implementation is very important because it becomes the norm once a critical mass of users of the technology is reached. What happens is that other device owners, lets use Bank ATMs as an example. Some middle manager will see that people are using fingerprints for security on their smart phones, so he will propose to have them installed on his banks ATM, so they can also be seen as cutting edge with technology, his proposal will not be technically informative, just that is it the thing to do now. Upper management get a look at this, they will be first movers in their industry, BAM! ATMs now require (will not be an option) fingerprints for security. That is how it starts, the next thing you know every other industry is using them in that fashion. When it gets to that stage, it is too late, even if companies realise the technology was implemented the wrong way, trying to change it will cost money. People(the masses who are not technically inclined) will find it confusing to use their figerprints as passwords for one device, but only as a username for more important devices such as ATMs, there will be a backslash and companies will need to spend money to educate their users, but we all know companies will not spend the money they will just go with the initial incorrect implementation of the technology.
This is ridiculous. A fingerprint is functionally equivalent to a passcode. It's a single factor of authentication. Some reality: No thief gives a fuck about your passcode. No thief gives a fuck about your fingerprints. If they're stealing your phone, they're going to wipe it and sell it. Only if you have nothing in the way, will they remotely give a fuck about the data on your phone. It's a matter of efficiency. If your phone is unlocked, they might look for useful info. Maybe. Most likely, they still only give a fuck about selling it as quickly as possible. So a passcode/fingerprint lock is essentially a buffer to make a would-be thief say: fuck it. I'll just sell it. If anyone REALLY wants the data on your phone, and they have physical access, they're going to get it. And they won't need to cut off your hand to do it. Once a determined attacker has physical access to your device, it's only a matter of time.
First apps are more of a learning experience than a profit machine. The fact that he has a working app is amazing. Most people can't say they've made an app before (although anyone can do it). I think this one will at least make him his $100, thanks to all the good press he's getting. After that he can get more ambitious and research into what's hot right now, what's never been done before, etc.
I didn't find my college programming courses very helpful at all, honestly, but that seems to vary for everyone. FWIW I was a non-CS major that took some CS courses out of interest, and I hated that those courses focused on things like the history of computing and why we have certain syntax things, etc. I just wanted to program, dang it! Anyway, I'm not a highly experienced developer but I've developed some things, particularly on the webapp front. I got started by learning plain ol' HTML, followed by CSS for some styling/design and JavaScript for basic functionality stuff. It was probably more chance than anything that I fell into starting with HTML—I was young and had no idea what compilers and all that were, whereas you can write HTML in Notepad/TextEdit, save it, and instantly view the results in a browser. The fundamental UI elements are already built in. I'm not saying this is the best way to learn how to program, but it's how I got started and have been doing fine since. Of course, HTML isn't really programming at all. It's just getting an idea of the general process of understanding how your "code" input affects output. Maybe that's wrong and someone with more experience/CS education than me can state it better, but that's how I see it. I then started playing around with PHP and creating dynamic web pages that interact with a database. Instead of stagnant HTML pages, I was able to create user login systems and store information about whatever users were doing in my (simple) web apps, stuff like that. I built upon my knowledge through experimentation and looking up tutorials—they are your friend so long as you actually read them and understand the code, as opposed to simply copy-and-pasting code segments. Finally I branched out into Objective-C and the Xcode world, which is part of my in-progress self-eduation to develop natively for iOS. Some people on here are mentioning things like codecademy.com. It's a cool tool, but the problem I have with it is that it doesn't, from what I've seen, actually teach you where the code goes or what to do with it. Ok, great, you can learn how to style an arbitrary box that they've placed on the screen or log something to the JS console, but it doesn't teach you in the first place how to actually create that box and place it in that arbitrary spot, or how to actually build JS functions into existing page structures rather than in abstract code snippets. Perhaps I didn't go far enough with the tutorials and I'm totally wrong here. At the very least, maybe try it out and simultaneously apply your knowledge to an actual .html file.
Its cool a homeless guy got the chance to learn to code. That being said. I dont see any info on the app hes making. It would appear its a puff piece with Zero substance beyond "You can do anything you set you mind too, even if you a homeless dude". The App's name is "Go Green". I'll bet I can find a myriad of shitty apps in either store that go by the same name. That offer info you can get from just about anywhere on going green and lowering your carbon footprint. Without a goal set now, I dont see this turning into anything more. Maybe someone will give him a book deal and he can live comfortably for a while while he gets on his feet.
Honestly this is the type of thing you write in your spare time. Selling it comes after. What I would do is sit down and make a business plan. Think about who would want it and who you want to target it to (what industry? Graphic design, accountants, lawyers, everyone that has billable hours?). After it is made, you can self-publish on an app store if it is a cell phone application or you can host it as a web app on Amazon EC2 or something similar (for free to start out, until the traffic builds then you have to pay). The way I would do it is to have it generic yet customizable enough (and modular) to have many organizations use it. Having it so specific as to sell to ONE company is self-limiting and therefore probably not worth as much money. Anyway, those are just my late night rambling thoughts about selling apps.
It just seems like, economically speaking, "Apps" make the least amount of sense for a high dollar investment ever (maybe second to beanie babies). We even have GREAT empirical data on what can go wrong ie. myspace, xanga, aim, etc... And yet Facebook goes and gets an IPO? then Twitter? WHY? These are companies in a field notorious for short term popularity (which never gets regained). Imagine Reddit getting an IPO or offered $5bill... hell I don't even understand reddit gold and yet I understand THAT more than why I would buy shares of twitter as a long term investment (and I actually love twitter btw). Appraising ANY app at $3bill doesn't make any sense. FB thinks its losing users and seems to be clamoring. Personally I think this is poor insight. Kids aren't leaving FB, they just aren't adopting it. Kids grow and become adults and most college kids who used FB when it was created are actually still on it. But kids ARE abandoning snap chat it seems... maybe thats the irony? Our society starts abandoning anything that becomes too popular. That would be a twist.
The Nexus 5 is the fucking you have with the hottest girl in school while you both orgasm multiple times in a flower bed of tulips.
Allow me to assist with this one, I worked on AT&Ts sale floor for about 3 years. Quit right before the first iPhone came out. The money I missed...but the bullets I dodged. Anyway, Store Managers are just Sales Managers. Stores I literally all for sales and sales only. They can do NOTHING to your contract. Every single person in that store has to call customer support just like you. Normally, we would just put you on the phone because we can do nothing. I would at least take the time to explain the situation to the rep, but ulimately, its up to the rep on the phone and their manager. Please do not take it out on the sales reps in store unless of course it is them who messed it up. Even then, if they apologize accept it if they are able to fix it. If they are dicks, then do what you do or let karma have them.
Here is my recent experience with AT&T: My plan was converted from a corporate account to a personal account, and in the process I had some odd $2.99 charge that I couldn't remove via their web site. In November I opened a chat on AT&T's support site to get it removed, and while killing time waiting for them to fix it mentioned that I was most likely going to fire them and switch to T-Mobile when my contract is up in February, since I could add a third line with them and still come out ~$35 cheaper than two lines were costing me on AT&T. When the first rep finished, she transferred the chat to someone in Customer Retention (or some similar name). I told him the same thing I'd told the first person re: T-Mobile, and he offered me free Family Messaging for six months. BOOM! $30 off my bill until May. I'm probably still going to fire them in May because I'll want that third line, but AT&T will get the first shot at matching again.
I really wish that all-day battery life became the new 'performance' trend. Even my aging galaxy S2 can do 95% of the things the S4 can do, but the problem is still "how long can it do these things". Having Google maps with 3d buildings and whatnot is sweet, but not that useful if the phone dies after 3 hours of navigation. Having to plan your smartphone usage during the day to avoid the risk of it dying while you're out for the evening is annoying and often stressful as well. "Gee I'd love to take some more pictures and video but I'll need gps to drive back home after dinner". Give us a phone that lasts 20 hours no matter what you do and I'll really consider it a game changer.
sigh I actually worked for two of these call centers in India as inbound support. One was a total scam. The other one was equally scammy but we legally got around the fraud part by just clearly telling them we are not Microsoft, but an independent remote tech support company offering remote 24hour support if they paid us money. I did the right thing (kind of). I used to email myself a copy of all the existing "customers" in the database, went home and called them all to tell them it was a scam. Of course, because I was strapped for cash at the time, I offered them MY personal tech support services to them, and sold them on the concept of basic computer maintenance/troubleshooting and general consultation on hardware/soft wares to save them money. It was all for a price way cheaper than geek squad and I was honest to them about it. They could take it or leave it. My job was just to tell them they can do it all this for free with some research and basic grasp on computers and they shouldn't be paying so much money for a one time cleanup and installation of pirated antivirus software. I told them if they are interested in keeping their computer running as fast and smoothly as possible, and being safe from malwares, hackers, etc., or something is going wrong with their comp, whether it's frozen or you simply don't know how to set up an email acct, i can be a phone call away during working hours, and schedule a weekly/bi-weekly maintenance (which is easy to do and I school them on how to do it if they seem like they know their way around an os ). It was an honest offer and a good deal. I Just laid out my plan and what I offered versus what geek squad would have charged them if they ran into x problem. I was very clear about the fact they can do all of this themselves for little to no cost, and that I was just offering my services so they don't have to deal with it. They won't have to go anywhere. Nobody has to come to their house. They don't have to deal with any extra charges. No bullshit. Just immediate support for their computers. By the end of the conversations, I became good friends with them. And I was successful! By the end of my three month tenure, I had my own clientele of close to 500 people who had paid me 150$ For 8 months of support. I had to hire two guys to help me, and they would just get calls at their house, see what the problem is, get them connected on logmein, and fixed their shit. Usually it would be some old dude who just wants to setup his home page to his yahoo mail inbox, because he doesn't know how to get there without clicking on the 'internet' icon. Or he's running shithardware and doesn't know why his computer keeps crashing. A lot of these people live alone with no family, or their families couldn't be bothered to help them with frivolous shit like this, so he called me, and I just get them connected, see what's wrong, either fix it within minutes, or if it's a hardware issue, run CPU-z or some shit, and point to the problem, and browse through the best deals they can get while we're connected right in front of him. Then the same guy will call again next week with some other problem. Except for the initial charge, there are no further charges whatsoever. There were no lies, no manipulation, no scams, no bullshit. You could say I took advantage of something here, but after realizing the level of immediate personalized support I provided them for 18 months straight, and seeing how much time and money I saved them after I calculated the figures of what it would have cost them if they had gone the traditional route of traveling to a PC repairman who would have charged shitloads of money for a single session, my conscious remains clear. I swear by the end of it, I started developing some kind of a PC-god complex after being praised so damn much by these poor old people. I was like some fucking computer fairy to them because their computer was always fast as shit and always ran smoothly, and if there were any bumps, it was fixed within the next half hour max, and it was always their fault. Lol. They kept telling me it was the best deal ever. And it actually was. Even if they had family or friends who were tech savvy, they didn't want to bother them every time they had an issue. So 150 for 8 months of guilt-free tech support was more than fair to them. I did nothing with their cc information since I was getting paid. I did tell them to cancel the card the call center had charged them with because they were going to try to charge the card again with socks5 proxies and all that. I ran a legit freelance remote tech support service for 8 months out of my fucking house. I used skype, open source VoIP soft wares, found good deals online to pay for all the phone charges. Most of the time they'd call me and I'd spend a few minutes getting them connected and then once in I'd hang up. Then I'd call them from skype when I was done. By the end of the 8 months, I decided to use all this money to move on to greener pastures, and found similar organizations like myself that were legit and honest, and transferred them over to them in bulk and got a sweet commission. ;) So you see, it's not always criminal scumbags working these places. The whole concept of remote tech support at this level is alien to even tech savvy folks like yourself, and obviously with all the ways this can be exploited, you will have the total black hat dudes like these call centers saying and doing anything to get as much money as possible in one call, getting cc info to charge and never calling back. Then there is the grey area where they lie about a lot of shit like telling them what they don't want them to know but still providing inbound support. Then there are organizations like what I was doing. No fear mongering, scare tactics, just support. Granted, it is annoying to get sales calls in general, but at least these guys are offering something legit. Luckily for me, I just played on the fact that my company was a scam and I just showed them how it's really supposed to be done, and sold them on the service by me. So you could say I manipulated things a little bit. But like I said above, I did the best I could to make sure they were aware of their options. Of course, I recorded all the conversations. As far as these call centers go, they are mostly filled with kids who are JUST getting into the call center business. They move from one call center to the next, just collecting their monthly salary. They honestly don't understand how fucked up they are scamming people like this. When you guys call them out on being scammers they look at YOU like you're the idiot and you're just saying that because you received an unsolicited call on your personal phone. Many know they're fucking you over, but they have no idea about the western world and think everyone is rich or some shit and that a 300$ charge is nothing for them. A lot of the guys are high as fuck on something. One of the top sales guys in one of the places used to huff paint EVERY fucking day before coming to work. No bullshit. To the callers themselves, this is truly just a job to them because it's presented to them in such a way. Like a legit call center with an hr department, tech support guys, managers, sales teams and all that. If anyone is the bad guy here, it's the owner of the business. And from what I've seen, even these guys are clueless on how bad they're fucking people over, and remain guilt free. The whole thing was really a fascinating experience overall. Anyways, I don't know who will read this, but just wanted to clear things up from someone who's actually worked at one of these places. If they ran it in a legit manner without lying I think they would actually be more successful.
I recieved a call from these guys. I led them on up until the point where they ask if you see any Warnings or Errors in your event logs when they asked what it said in the event log I replied with mahder chod. I have a New England accent all I heard on the other end of the line was silence for about 10 seconds followed by "excuse me?" I then repeated and they put me on speaker phone and asked me to repeat and asked what country I was from. Click Dial tone......
Estimates I see on these things rate success at around 0.1% max. But that might just be because the math is easier. In general though, scammers hope that 1% of those people they send it to read the e-mail and 1% of those people fall for the scam. The numbers may be higher for calling someone but I'm not sure how much higher they would be and you are operating with a higher cost when making calls. If we do use the same email success rate, he'd have to call approximately 2.66 million people. I saw elsewhere in this thread his "business" was in operation for 2 months. So that'd have been 44,333 calls a day, or in excess of 30 calls a minute. It's not impossible but as you can see the cost of making those calls is going to start to scale poorly in order to get 1,000 successful scams.
Since no one has yet, sure.
Within the ongoing discussion regarding Technology subreddits the treatment of the phrase "Politics" bothers me. I believe that within our community we host a significant number of professionals capable of taking complex topics and discussing them in an insightful manner. When a difficult topic is broken down in an accessible way I find it adds value to the conversation. I learn something new that furthers my understanding, improving my ability to form assumptions. "Politics" seems to become a catch-all for topics when they are not fully understood but potential exists for more than one interpretation. Often a story is politicized along the lines of "Republicans argue this", and "Democrats argue that". It's largely a matter of semantics without much room for discussion. This to me is the type of article that deserves the "Political" label. Other times a story is difficult to access, but may be quantified. A nuanced topic that relies on previous understanding or that more than one approach may be the appropriate response. Our community is well suited to dissect and assess these topics, I feel that too often they are miscategorized as "Politics". When the underlying concepts are unfamiliar it is often difficult to discern between the two types of story. It's easy to mistakenly apply the "Politics" label. Stories related to the legal environment surrounding technology are a good example of the latter category. The legal end of the spectrum tend to be difficult concepts that often require some background familiarity to digest, but is ultimately quantifiable. Shedding light on these topics through discussion is where this community can really shine, and is an important function given the widespread implications for existing and future technologies. Perhaps I place too much faith in the community to sort through a difficult concept, but I bristle when I see the "Politics" label, or "circlejerk!" brought out prematurely for a topic I feel I could learn from. In that regard, I commend /r/technology for providing an avenue to retain some of these discussions through the "Tech Politics" flair. I feel /r/tech has missed the mark by moving to restrict these by citing the number of stories on Net Neutrality breaking-news.
These quotes from this article may lend insight into why we don't see too many women at the top of tech fields. First two paragraphs are from the first source, the third from the latter. >In the past, technology jobs were viewed by women as populated by men in basements, working alone, as an organ of the computer. Harvey Mudd’s President, Maria Klawe compiled her own research and offered a more substantive explanation, “We’ve done lots of research on why young women don’t choose tech careers and number one is they think it’s not interesting. Number two, they think they wouldn’t be good at it. Number three, they think they will be working with a number of people that they just wouldn’t feel comfortable or happy working alongside.” >We can do better than a frustratingly low number (9 percent) of CIOs that are female. At a time when girls in general comprise about 46% of the advanced placement calculus test takers but that approximately 80% of them don’t end up taking a computer science class, clearly something is not working. >In 2008, women received 57% of all undergraduate degrees but represented only 18% of all Computer and Information Sciences undergraduate degrees. There has been a 79% decline, between 2000 and 2008, in the number of incoming undergraduate women interested in majoring in Computer Science. As a result, only 27% of computer scientists today are female. What can we, as WIT members, do about this trend?
I think you're right, on a fundamental basis. But there are many other factors in play. It's not just a matter of whether or not the service works for you. There are social stigmas already attached to privacy and lack of an online social media presence. Not having a form of social media is quickly becoming the equivalent of being an atheist in a southern town. You're immediately labeled an outsider, and for many young people (FB's primary demo) feeling like an outsider is devastating. Quick example: I went for a job interview last year. Interview was going great until it was brought up that I has no social media presence. The interview ended abruptly after that, and I never heard back from the job.
Here you go buddy: HR 4681 (voted on and passed in both the US House and Senate) section 309 states: >SEC. 309. PROCEDURES FOR THE RETENTION OF INCIDENTALLY ACQUIRED COMMUNICATIONS . (a) DEFINITIONS.—In this section: (1) COVERED COMMUNICATION.—The term ‘‘covered commu- nication’’ means any nonpublic telephone or electronic commu- nication acquired without the consent of a person who is a party to the communication, including communications in electronic storage . >(2) HEAD OF AN ELEMENT OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMU- NITY.—The term ‘‘head of an element of the intelligence commu- nity’’ means, as appropriate— (A) the head of an element of the intelligence commu- nity; or (B) the head of the department or agency containing such element. >(3) UNITED STATES PERSON.—The term ‘‘United States per- son’’ has the meaning given that term in section 101 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801). (b) PROCEDURES FOR COVERED COMMUNICATIONS.— (1) REQUIREMENT TO ADOPT.—Not later than 2 years after the date of the enactment of this Act each head of an element of the intelligence community shall adopt procedures approved by the Attorney General for such element that ensure compli- ance with the requirements of paragraph (3). >(2) COORDINATION AND APPROVAL.—The procedures required by paragraph (1) shall be— (A) prepared in coordination with the Director of National Intelligence; and (B) approved by the Attorney General prior to issuance. >(3) PROCEDURES.— (A) APPLICATION.—The procedures required by paragraph (1) shall apply to any intelligence collection activity not otherwise authorized by court order (including an order or certification issued by a court established under sub- section (a) or (b) of section 103 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1803)), subpoena, or similar legal process that is reasonably anticipated to result in the acquisition of a covered communication to or from a United States person and shall permit the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of covered communications subject to the limitation in subparagraph (B). >(B) LIMITATION ON RETENTION.— A covered communication shall not be retained in excess of 5 years, unless — (i) the communication has been affirmatively determined, in whole or in part, to constitute foreign intelligence or counterintelligence or is necessary to understand or assess foreign intelligence or counterintelligence; (ii) the communication is reasonably believed to constitute evidence of a crime and is retained by a law enforcement agency; (iii) the communication is enciphered or reasonably believed to have a secret meaning ; (iv) all parties to the communication are reasonably believed to be non-United States persons; (v) retention is necessary to protect against an imminent threat to human life , in which case both the nature of the threat and the information to be retained shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees not later than 30 days after the date such retention is extended under this clause; (vi) retention is necessary for technical assurance or compliance purposes, including a court order or discovery obligation, in which case access to information retained for technical assurance or compliance purposes shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees on an annual basis; or (vii) retention for a period in excess of 5 years is approved by the head of the element of the intelligence community responsible for such retention, based on a determination that retention is necessary to protect the national security of the United States, in which case the head of such element shall provide to the congressional intelligence committees a written certification describing— (I) the reasons extended retention is necessary to protect the national security of the United States; (II) the duration for which the head of the element is authorizing retention; (III) the particular information to be retained; and (IV) the measures the element of the intelligence community is taking to protect the privacy interests of United States persons or persons located inside the United States. [Link To PDF]( You should also note that when the United States government says something is an Imminent Threat , it doesn't mean what you think it does. They define an Imminent Threat as the following according to a 2013 DOJ White Paper entitled Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa'ida or An Associated Force : >...the condition that an operational leader present an "imminent" threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future. Link To PDF So what does that all mean? It means both the House and Senate (this is not a Democrat vs. Republican thing.. You should be passed that by now, hopefully) voted to approve and make lawful the collection and retention of any data collected by the government (and we know the NSA can and does do this, although the media just focused on meta-data , but we all know what it really was). And they don't need proof to do it. They can simply say we need to retain this data because it poses an Imminent Threat and retention is now lawful (despite the fact that they have redefined the term to mean they don't need proof).
rofl, you're a fucking joke guy.. first of all, the original post I responded to was shit-on because it was so long, ridiculous, thousands of words, with zero direction or guidance from OP.. then you do the exact same thing.. like you included the definition of "person" just to add another 1000+ words to your argument and overly-complicate it... in fact, after reading the bullshit you posted; I saw the one sentence about "A covered communication shall not be retained in excess of 5 years, unless— (i) the communication has been affirmatively determined, in whole or in part, to constitute foreign intelligence or counterintelligence or is necessary to understand or assess foreign intelligence or counterintelligence"... so basicallly..... they aren't monitoring everybodys communication for no reason... so basically, everything you said is actually like psychotically paranoid and wrong.... so unless you work with alqaeda and pose a threat, then everything u posted has nothing to do with any of us... and then your
He doesn't understand that even a child knows that earth's climate naturally changes. Even a child can see that we should be developing green technologies. "Climate change denier" is a bullshit term. While I totally believe in developing green technologies, I am not convinced that man is driving climate change. I have a PhD in physics and an appreciation for how difficult it is to establish causality in even tightly controlled experiments, so I'm not very swayed by correlations. I don't believe that we are in any real danger just because some studies suggest it. I haven't seen any specific predictions made by climate scientists come true, so why should I trust their conclusions? Al Gore and his movie got people alarmed making them think that snow would be a thing of the past by now and that sea levels would have risen to swallow coastal cities. Obviously that has not at all happened.
It won't die immediately, but due to the outright exploitation of cable and broadcast companies it's on it's way out. They way it delivers content is simply inferior to streaming services in every single way except widespread adaptation, and that is changing literally by the day. For example, I and many of my friends will absolutely never, ever subscribe to cable. There is simply no need to do so. The advances in the delivery of content are converting more and more people to my way of thinking, and the people who are immune to this are generally not going to be around that long. I sympathize with your need to feed your family, but unfortunately society is not obligated to provide you with the opportunity to satisfy that need. You have to either keep yourself and your skillset relevant or suffer the consequences of obsolescence. This is true now and has been true every single time a new technology has come along that streamlines the process and removes occupations.
LTE explained elsewhere (
I'm afraid you've missed the point of the legal argument. John Deere is saying that farmers do not own their tractors enough and they may not install open source software. The claim is that would be a hack and piracy and illegal. Something like this: > It comes with it's own wiring harness that you install by cutting the leads to the original harness and splicing in. They cannot 'shut it off'. It is completely out of their control. My hardware,my software. Is exactly the sort of thing John Deere claims is illegal. John Deere knows you can do what you said above and all this is to stop exactly that. If they are successful, then that means it will be a federal crime to "cut the leads to the original harness and splicing in" which will prosecuted by government (not a civil case) and come complete with fines and jail time just like other copyright infringement since 2008 (I think 2008). And if John Deere is successful then it will not only be their tractors affected but everything. There's no special copyright for tractors or farm machinery. It will apply to your car, your PS4, your iPhone, and your toaster if it has a ROM carrying software in it.
Also, since they are trying to do something big auto isn't, some probably know things that big auto's engineers don't. Hubris, one of the greatest renewable resources. This isn't theoretical physics. The ins and outs of the combustable engine tuning is not a big secret. 99.9% of the tunes that produce the big gains consumers are looking for are merely timing adjustments and turbo boost increases. >You don't need to be revolutionary to be better. Sometimes you just need to try harder or try something different. I wholeheartedly agree, but the OPs post suggests that the tuners somehow know more or better than the manufacturers. While that maybe the case sometimes, it's foolish to think that the ONLY reason that aftermarket outperforms OEM is because of the lack of knowledge of the manufacturers. The OP totally ignores the economic impact of ECU tunes that decrease longevity for performance, which is mostly to everyone's mutual advantage. Pushing the tune closer to the limits of tolerance will increase the frequency of failure and this drive maintenance costs up as well as hurt residual and resale values. That means the car will now cost the consumer more which drives sales down. Everyone loses. Inadvertently, and totally irrelevant and besides the point, even the tuners lose. You know those quick and easy $500 flashes and kits for 40+hp gains on stock turbo cars? Those turn into 10-15hp gains and sales will dip. Again, it's irrelevant, but interesting nonetheless.
Similar situation happened with me and Centurylink. I was living in a town whose population was just barely over 100. A town so small you could blink and completely miss it. Centurylink advertised and verified that I could get a 10 meg dsl connection at the address I was moving to. (10 is on the higher end of the speed spectrum in my area.) When the installer comes out however, he calls and tells me I can only get 1.5. I told him that I was guaranteed a 10 meg connection and his response was "Well you can't get it but it will work for you to browse the internet." I called their support line and told them what was going on, that I do far more than browse facebook. Their only response was that if their installer says it's not available, then it's not available. I finally gave up and just resigned myself to a crappy 1.5 connection. However, after a couple of weeks I noticed that my download speeds were much, much higher than something a 1.5 would allow. A speed test showed that not only was I NOT getting 1.5, I was getting, sometimes, in excess of 11. I was happy thinking that perhaps the installer was just wrong and that I was left with a 10 meg package. A few months go by and one day I start having issues with my connection. I call their support and they drop the bomb that I was not being charged for 10, I was only being charged for 1.5. Then, instead of just updating my bill, they dropped my speeds down to 1.5. I got pissed extremely quick. I told them that I ordered a 10 meg connection, so I want my bill, and account, to reflect that. She said that she couldn't do that as "she had to send a technician out to verify those speeds are available." No matter how many times i reiterated that I was just receiving those speeds less than 30 minutes prior to speaking with her, she would not adjust my account. Eventually I agreed to have them send someone out to "test" the lines. Again, the technician said that I could not get 10, but that I could instead get 8. I finally settled with that and told their support that if anything else goes wrong with my account at any point I am going to refuse to pay and they can cancel my service.
AT&T is the only provider available in my house in Michigan and they are truly awful. We lost service for four months which they refused to credit us for despite dozens of acknowledgements that there was a legitimate problem on their end, we've had several technicians come by and tell us that they're meters are showing we can get double the speed we are paying for (and triple what we are ACTUALLY getting), we've had salespeople tell us that they don't show our address as having internet available to us in the system despite being provided with account information that dates back nearly 15 years.
Its free" in an office setting sometimes ISNT "its free" when you factor in the costs of retraining all the formerly MS-using employees. There's always the people that wont figure out anything for themselves and they'll just be pissed off that everything's changed, and then you have to retrain them all and deal with the short period where you lose productivity as everyone gets used to the new OS and apps.
I've got mild ADD, at times I never read any post with more than 2-4 lines of text. Sorry that I offended you so much. Really you could have just seen the
I'm not sure you can digitize 7 million unique books for less than this costs. Mind that these are usually quite old items not in the best condition. They would probably have to be loaded into scanners manually. You would need people to turn the pages when automated processes fail(and they will fail in some little percentage of page-turns). And then after that you still have to store the books somewhere, because rightly no one will let you destroy them.
Chill out with your outrage and re-read what i said. What requests has Al Qaeda made? When have they ever offered to stop attacking us if we agreed to their demands? What reality are you living on? I never said they weren't political and I'm not saying "They hate our freedom" or any BS like that, in fact i sympathize with them. I'm aware of Operation Ajax, the Iraq sanctions, our support of Israel etc. and if i were them, i would probably hate the US just as much as they do. But most (not all) Islamic extremists are very poor, uneducated, in a broken country with no prospects and are frustrated. And it doesn't take much for someone who is political to point at the debaucherous Americans on TV living it up and convince them that those people are the reason why their situation is so bad, and religious leaders can and do convince them that they are the embodiment of everything evil in the world. These are not politically minded people with specific goals like the IRA. They are on a holy mission to kill the "great devil" AKA the US. (Yes i'm aware there are a few exceptions like the underwear bomber being the son of a diplomat, and a few of the 9/11 bombers were kind of middle class.)
There is a difference in pixels per inch (PPI) and dots per inch (DPI). A pixel on a screen is three subpixels (red,green,blue). A dot on paper is a single color. Comparing these two is comparing apples to oranges, and varies from printer to printer. I'm quite aware of the technology and the way it works. Your perception of how photo printers work is inaccurate, though, and your assertion that they are "apples and oranges" is simply wrong. The 300dpi figure is chosen because of the average human eye's ability to resolve detail at average viewing distances, and that does not change very much regardless of the media, and the differences that DO exist are caused by the fact that prints are reflective and screens are transilluminated. Furthermore, I've got four photo printers in my house right now, and not ONE of them uses primary colors, and all exceed (by FAR) your 'effective resolution guess' of 100-200dpi. 300dpi is the final effective resolution , not some intermediate figure - the actual ink dots are upwards of 600-1400 dpi, and they overlap - that is, you cannot see the dots (except in special cases) even with a loupe. >That's why a iPhone at 160 ppi is sharper than a photoprint at 300dpi. The photoprint needs to be 450 or so dpi to compare equally. The iPhone's screen is not sharper than a 300dpi print; don't believe me? Order a print from mpix and look at your iPhone and the print with a loupe. It appears sharper, because the contrast on a transilluminated screen is MUCH higher than is possible with reflective art, and our eyes interpret contrast as 'sharpness'... No matter what terms you use, a 300ppi screen would be similar in resolution to a 300dpi print, and would appear much sharper than an iPhone screen, while most people (at normal viewing distances) can't tell the difference between a 300dpi print and a 450dpi ("HD") print. To put a very fine point on this, take a photograph of an eye chart at some reasonable distance so that the fine print is smaller than the finest resolving power of both media (the screen and the print). Then size the print such that the largest print size is the same size on the screen and the photo. Then get out your loupe. You'll be able to read MUCH finer text on the print than on the screen. Because the print is MUCH higher in resolution, ie "sharper" in a measurable sense.
That statement is utter BS. 100rmb is nothing here for the people who would be taking that train. The regular train price between Hangzhou and Shanghai is 60rmb, and that took about an hour and a half or so stopping at two or three stops, very briefly. This guy is seriously automobile bias. Lets think real quick... I live in SH and I don't have a car. I would have to rent a car for about 100rmb per day. Buy gas for it, which is more than double US prices. Park it. Get insurance for me. Not to mention take take the Chinese driving test which is about 2,000rmb. THEN I can get to Hangzhou in two hours of driving myself. How is that less costly then a 100rmb ticket? How is it more convenient?
The virus would have to change its code to avoid signatures, if I understand the concept correctly. I know some websites with malicious code will rename variables that defeats lower-quality signature detection. Some malicious web code, from what I've seen in papers, will take the command that it wants to execute (and will typically be caught by signature detection of some sort) and chop it up. For instance: execute "badcommand" will be caught by an anti-virus Virus then does: jsakdl = "ba"; bjakd = "dcom"; sjkafle = "mand"; execute jsakdl + bjakd + sjkafle A lot of signature detection is usually useless against new viruses. Like wikipedia said, generic signatures could be used, but these can produce a lot of false-positives, which might lead the user to not trust the anti-virus as much.
You take credit where none is due. Better information replaced bad information and this thread was upvoted as such and is now almost at 1000. Not only that, others are downvoting the original threads so those will end up being buried.
Thank you for the detailed reply.
I spent a bunch of years working for a major label, specifically in the digital distribution arena (I was largely responsible for managing the content delivery to Spotify and Youtube, amongst others). Here's (a very simplified) overview of how this works: When a platform (like Grooveshark) signs a deal with a label, they being to receive metadata on that label's catalogue. That data includes general information on the tracks, but most importantly: rights information. For example: a record company may own the rights to distribute Joe Blogg's album in the UK, but not in France (the artist may have signed a deal with another label in other countries). Essentially the label is saying, "if a UK user streams this, then pay us. If a French user streams it, it's nothing to do with us." Equally, they may say "we have the rights to distribute this physically, but not digitally". The platform then is obligated to remove that track from distribution in France, until they can work out an agreement with the license holder in that territory. Fair enough right? Well, the problem with Grooveshark is that they do this some of the time . There's thousands of tracks they have that they haven't worked out the licensing for, and they don't know who to pay. That's fine for a while, especially when you''re in the early days of launching a service, but there's a limit to how long rights owners will put up with it. It seems some of them have reached that limit. Also, other platforms (e.g. Spotify) have managed it, so they need to catch up.
Wait a second. I may have jumped the gun it looks like the site may just be [down]( But then again with a proxy it is up, so I am unsure. I whois the site and it was created on the third of this month, so its relatively new and I don't know is all isp's would jump on it that quickly. Also [alexa]( says that they have almost no traffic, so why would isp's make a martyr and risk a lawsuit.
STOP . Pause. Breathe. This is probably not censorship. There are more details in [this AskReddit thread]( What appears to be going on here is that the americancensorship.org 'A' record does not exist in many places in the DNS system. It is not a specifically American problem, since there are [some international nameservers]( that do not possess that record. While it is easy to say that ISPs are blocking access to americancensorchip.org, [it's not in Google's public DNS either]( meaning that one of SOPA's opponents would be censoring access to a site whose message they support . It's also not showing up in many ISP-provided DNSes, meaning that ISPs and Google would have to be cooperating. Not likely. My personal theory is that what happened here is that American Censorship decided to move their website, but messed up the DNS update somehow. Note that it resolves fine if you're using their host's nameservers of ns1.dreamhost.com, ns2.dreamhost.com, and ns3.dreamhost.com. You'll probably notice that you can't access them at their IP address of [75.101.145.87]( That's because americancensorship.org is being hosted on a Dreamhost shared-hosting server, meaning that many different sites are being hosted with the same IP address on the same box. [AgentME explains here]( If you want to get to the site without using a domain name, try using [ to get there, as per [grundyreadit's comment]( **[
While it is certainly fair to put sales tax on online purchases, it should be exempt for anyone making less than the poverty line. Sales tax is one of the most regressive taxes. CEO's do not purchase 150 times the amount of stuff as the median worker. All CEO's pay less sales tax as a percentage of their income than the poverty line worker. Americans are already spending most of their disposable income. Consumption is still about 70% of GDP. If you increase the functional sales tax rate this quickly the economy will take a hit.
It changes all the time. There are many ways to be a "real" pirate. The Pirate Bay is the 'above ground' choice of the day. The Napster, The Kazaa. I would have also accepted usenet as a real nerd style. Real pirates contribute in some way to the community. Most PB leechers do not. The rare time my private tracker doesn't have what I want, I just request, and its there, and saturating my connection due to seedboxes. I've been pirating since the early days of usenet, before AOL through BBSs in the 80s. Used to crack and release games when it was unique to have a computer using hex editors. Piecing together MIME data together in DOS edit manually to get the newest game or whatever. But being an 'actual' pirate lost most of its lustre as I grew into being an adult. Now I just dl whatever, but also buy and write software and enjoy supporting program authors if its a good fair priced product. I miss the old days of running a listed FTP server on IRC, and having regulars. The craziest was in the late 90. I met this sweedish 'kid' on the internet, and his conneciton was so slow and expensive, he FXP'd what he wanted to my FTP, and I burned and mailed him the stuff he wanted. It was a pretty cool arrangement.
If you read a bit you'll see that they have already released an "opt-in" feature on android a few weeks ago and they are adding it to IOS soon... Everyones so worried about privacy these days they forget what makes the world work. People try to make things as efficient as possible. Not everyone is a bad guy. [ :"Information collected by third parties, which may include such things as location data or contact details, is governed by their privacy practices. We encourage you to learn about the privacy practices of those third parties." Looks to me like WE screwed the pooch on this one. You may not get angry with companies when they take information if you do not read their policies. If anyone angered by this took a moment to read the policies they "agree" to, this wouldn't be a big issue. Now if someone called Path and specifically asked for the data that they take though use of their application, and they lied, then we could get angry.
The NHS sound amazing. During health reform, we tried to shout "Single Payer! Single Payer!" but we didn't $hout loud enough. Conservatives here are pretty well organized against things that help people out. There are too many interests in keeping private healthcare in place, cause it makes so much fuckin money!
As another poster commented it may just be ignorance. But I think it has more to do with what I guess can be called "generational indoctrination". You could probably lose count of the number of dysoptian future science fiction works which depict cold, one-eyed cameras in the sky as a means of oppression. I assume we've all grown up with similar notions and it wouldn't strike me the least bit odd if a drone flew by a group of pedestrians and from a third-party view you would see them begin walking a little faster, with better posture, talking amongst themselves a little softer etc.
I agree with almost everything you just said. I saw a Top Gear where they drove a supercharged diesel Jaguar and it got around the same gas mileage as a Prius gets here in the states. I don't understand why people drive hybrids instead of diesels. That said, I cringed at your last sentence. Sure, throwing a turbo or supercharger helps to overcome the lack of punch in diesel cars, but they do accelerate slower than their petrol cousins with similar displacements.
The reason for the price increase in diesel fuel is that, because so many people saw that diesel engines had better fuel economy and diesel fuel was cheaper, they switched to diesel engined cars. Demand for diesel fuel went up and demand for gasoline went down, relatively speaking. Generally there are more octanes (=gasoline/petrol) than hexadecanes (=diesel fuel) in a typical barrel of crude oil, and today most oil exploration is looking for crude oil with that same proportion. As the supply of diesel fuel (relative to gasoline) didn't magically increase, the increased demand made diesel fuel more expensive than gasoline. Imagine what would happen if every American car was switched for a diesel engine? Americans represent the largest portion of demand for gasoline. The price of diesel fuel would skyrocket, and we'd have a glut of unused gasoline. Everyone would just switch back.
that is not true at all. I work in a BWR and there is no 'computer'. It's all relays and hardwired systems and no digital electronics (remember these plants were designed in the 60s). During startup, you manually pull rods in sequence and watch for the reactor to go critical. Once the reactor goes critical, power exponentially increases, and you have to manually range the 8 core power detectors pretty rapidly. If you fail to keep any of them on range they put in a reactor scram vote or a 1/2 scram, and if you accidentally turn the knob 2 ranges instead of one, or if you accidentally range it down and cause the detector to go off scale, it puts in a reactor scram vote or 1/2 scram signal. It's actually pretty difficult as you have to watch 6-8 indications and manually, continuously, keep all the detectors on scale to keep reactor power indications valid. I've unintentionally scrammed the reactor in the simulator a few times because of mistakes with the low power range monitors. When I first started in simulator training, they made me pull the first crit for the whole group and i fucked it up and got made an example of.
I used to like SomethingAwful a lot more before it got to the point where I started meeting actual human beings in real life who self-identified as "goons," and would say shit like that out loud, and treat it as the defining portion of their personality. I don't think there's anyone other than some hilariously-misguided sixteen year olds who go around in real life claiming they're "part of anon" or anything, though those people would be equally sad to meet if they exist.