Posts by Twilight 140 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Nov 2010
The exact same place. The VP has no legal standing to do anything other than count the electoral votes presented to him. There have already been a few (half a dozen?) cases filed by Trump and the GOP about this that have all failed.
There is significant evidence that a lot of the "BLM rioting" was nothing of the kind. At least in Minnesota, the rioting and burning was started by a white man wearing a gas mask of the type issued by the St Paul police (but no way to identify him and it is possible to buy as a civilian (just very expensive)). A lot of the later rioting and burning appeared to be done by groups of armed white men. If nothing else, the common sense factor says it was highly unlikely to be non-whites (or white BLM supporters) as the areas of Minneapolis that were burned were predominantly non-white.
The "protesters" were predominantly white so little was done and the media mostly failed to call them out on being insurrectionists. If this had been a predominantly non-white group, a lot more than 1 would have been shot and the media would have immediately labeled them insurrectionists and/or rioters.
I would happily pay for Firefox if it was a good product. I used to use Firefox long ago then switched as it got worse and worse. I've kept up (broadly) on Firefox news. A year or two ago, I wanted to switch away from Chrome due to memory usage and some other issues. I tried Firefox for a few weeks and found that it used almost twice as much memory as Chrome for the same tabs with fewer addons installed (so I gave up and went back to Chrome).
This has happened to me quite a lot over the years. I've had my gmail address since 2004 and it is just lastname@gmail.com (it is an uncommon last name - every person I've encountered with the same has ended up being a distant relative).
If it seems to be a genuine important email, I will try to figure out the intended recipient or try contacting the sender. I've gotten medical appointments, dental appointments, stuff from lawyers, seemingly important orders for an artist (she seemed to be a very nice lady but her name was nothing like mine so no idea how she ended up using my email), etc. There have been plenty of other random ones (letting "Sue" know when the next choir practice was, etc).
The most troubling was a couple emails from Qantas about my flights that included links to modify/cancel the bookings. I did follow the links to see if I could figure out how to contact the actual customer and it did look like I could freely modify/cancel the booking without any further validation. I could not find contact info for the customer but did contact Qantas - it took them about a year (3 times reporting the issue) to remove my email from the account. As far as I know, they have not added any extra security (makes me WAY less likely to fly Qantas).
The most annoying was someone named "Samuel" who used my email to sign up for "every" payday loan service (for months, I got a slowly decreasing slew of spam from them (starting at over 100 emails per day)). Absolutely none of the services used any sort of email verification. A couple years later, he used my email again a few times (again for payday loans and something else but, fortunately, only a couple payday loan places this time).
I wish I had a choice other than Comcast but, because of the way the ISPs "compete", there is no other viable choice where I am (and I'm close enough to a city that my zipcode is split between a city and the suburb I'm in). The only fiber option is Comcast but they wanted $300/month so we skipped and went with Business (pay extra but guaranteed uptime and better customer service) for less than half that. There are 3-4 other companies offering fiber with 1-5 miles of us but that would mean the ISPs would have to actually like compete.
NoScript really doesn't help in this case. The best route to weaponize this would be to compromise a popular website and inject the malicious JavaScript. Provided it is one of the many sites that requires JavaScript to function, it will be whitelisted for most NoScript users.
Binding arbitration clauses should be illegal. At least auto-renewal occasionally has a valid use (Netflix or the like).
Which is more likely to give you a fair shake? A court or an arbitrator that is wholly paid by the company (eg your opponent)?
Iirc, the "no court" clause has never been tested but it would likely be a very expensive lawsuit as any company fighting it would likely get lots of help from all the other corporations that just love binding arbitration agreements.
Except that he was in the US and there have been some monumentally stupid patent decisions in courts here. There are plenty of examples of a patent being "xxx on a computer" or "xxx on a wireless device (phone)" where xxx was a well-known concept that have held up for a while (still?) and cost tons of money in court fees and settlements.
I live in a close-in suburb of a major city but my options are highly limited. I'm sure I show up as fibre served because one provider offers fiber service at $300+/month. There are two reasonable fibre services about 1 mile and 2 miles from my residence but they are slow to expand outwards. Less than 5 miles away is an area served by 5-6 fibre services.
I don't understand why providers are allowed to ALL roll out fibre service in the same relatively small areas and ignore everywhere else. I know they claim that, if they don't, they will lose out on customers but wouldn't they actually gain more customers by rolling fibre out to an un(der)-served area (not meaning rural but even suburbs or other parts of cities)?
Try actually doing some research. A lot of the destruction of black neighborhoods was NOT done by black protesters or rioters. The initial riots in Minneapolis were started by a Caucasian dressed in a gas mask and other gear/clothing to conceal his identity (the gas mask was the same model as used by the St Paul police but is also available to the public (for $300+)). A lot of the rioting and violence was perpetrated by white supremacists.
Win95/98 was good. I vaguely recall liking the "classic" theme in Windows XP a little better (the "new" XP UI/theme was pretty bad) - it's possible I did extra tweaking with PowerToys (I so miss the original set of those). I liked Windows 7 but it required some extra installs to fix the worst bits of changes.
I *HATE* the flat design and current color-schemes that seem to be so in-vogue right now.
My first thought was why benchmark SQL on EC2? SQL will (I think) always be cheaper on RDS and should perform the same. Of course, that assumes SQL means a SQL RDBMS and not specifically SQL Server (which may have to be run on EC2 if it is not an RDS option (can't remember off-hand and can't be bother to bring up AWS to check))...
There are already multiple companies making good lightning cables. I have cables from at least two other companies that are better (longer, tougher, and some have L-plugs on the USB side) and cheaper than official Apple cables. I have no idea if they licensed from Apple or reverse-engineered the interface...
It could be a good tool but, right now, it has WAY too many issues. Search doesn't work. Wiki functionality is horrible (or was that in Sharepoint). Linking from one thing to another is way harder than it should be. Web apps could be better done separately rather than in Teams. Sharepoint integration is just odd - things you would think would integrate don't and things you wouldn't expect do. etc...
You need a lot more than that. You can turn a petrol car into a BAD electric car by replacing the engine. For a good electric car, you need to design it from the ground up as electric. Tesla has done this and is known for it. I think a few e-cars from primarily petrol vehicle companies have been as well.
Personally, if fast charging stations were more prevalent and the range per charge was 2-3 times what it currently is, I would absolutely get a purpose-built electric vehicle (very possibly a Tesla).
Regardless on if you like Tesla or not, the Model S is pretty universally regarded as one of the best vehicles available (in the US anyway). Of course, the S does cost just a *tad* more than the 3...
I would love to see the US return to some form of sanity. The "far left" are what used to be called centrists. The middle has moved so far right it's not funny. Way too many people are (somehow) convinced to vote against their own self-interest (ex many people who benefit from the ACA have been convinced to vote for politicians that want to get rid of it). Only in the US do we have health care that is getting more and more expensive with quality getting worse and worse (we now have the highest prices with the worst quality of care in all categories among first-world countries).
Absolutely no shooters in the US have used assault rifles - those are fully automatic military weapons that have been illegal (without a class III federal license) for decades. The shooters have used so-called "assault weapons" which are nothing more than semi-auto hunting rifles that look like assault rifles. I have no issue with effective gun control but I haven't seen any such thing in at least 20 years proposed in the US. Outlawing "assault weapons" does absolutely nothing without outlawing other rifles with the same characteristics (primarily other semi-auto rifles with the same magazine capacity). It's similar to the law that went through after the Las Vegas shooting - it outlawed bump stocks but did nothing for the other 2-4 devices that do the same thing.
First, they are clearly patent trolls. That *SHOULD* mean they lose any case they bring (but, of course, it doesn't)...
Then there's the matter of their patents that were upheld. I don't actually see *ANYTHING* novel in one of them. The other is novel only in that it combines five blindingly obvious things into one "system". I fail to understand why these patents were (re)found to be valid. Then again, I am frequently shocked by what patents are actually upheld - sometimes, it seems the patent reviews are done by a group of monkeys and then the courts rely on the monkeys to determine if they should have been approved in the first place.
As others have said, this is basically Oracle whining about not being awarded part of the contract (they know there's no way they could get the whole thing).
At one time Oracle was king but those days are long gone. These days, Oracle is only marginally better than Sybase (which basically hasn't seen much development since SAP took them over).
I'm willing to bet permission for recordings is buried in the Amazon Alexa agreements you have to "read" (yeah, right) and click "accept".
I don't understand why Amazon needs to store the actual recordings though. Voice print can be done without the recordings. Database of lots of info can be done without the recordings. Why does having the recordings benefit Amazon?
I'm just shocked that Pai is making it even more obvious that he's just a shill for big telecom. Okay, not really - he's made it pretty obvious even before he became commissioner.
As the article notes, this is the standard industry (any industry) practice when they have a shill in a key office - throw up some nearly useless "rules" that later get watered down even more in order to avoid any actual laws being passed that might interfere with profits.
$100/year is extortionate? I guess we have very different ideas of unreasonable pricing. I only have about 4 GB of data on DropBox but I have no issue paying $100/year for the service. No issues with data retention on DropBox but I do backup all my DropBox data.
>>> Oh "shock horror" doing a quick sync/backup before updating?
How exactly do you do that when Microsoft can and does arbitrarily decide when your machine should be updated. I've gone down in the morning to find my laptop rebooted after an update overnight (with no prior notice that it was going to be done that night) and I've gotten notices that Windows 10 was updating "right now" to "improve Windows". I have also sometimes gotten "there's an update pending - do you want to update now?" to which I almost always delay a little to let other people find as many issues as possible.
Mine is accurate as to who but seems iffy on the bandwidth. I live in an urban area (inner suburb of large metro) and my choices are:
Comcast (they deserve all the hate) listed as 250/25 Mbps - maybe if you live right next to the CO
CenturyLink (if anything, worse than Comcast) listed as 20/1 Mbps (about right)
Nextera (wireless) listed as 6/6 Mbps (no idea - too slow to check out)
and multiple satellite providers which might work for streaming but not work or gaming
So, in reality, we have a choice of 1 (Comcast). We're in the process of dumping Comcast phone and cable tv but really have no choice on internet.
The most ironic part is they just ran two fiber bundles through our front yard for the high school (way more than 1 school needs) but we can't pay to have fiber run to our house.
Basing taxes on zip code does not work. Zip codes do not align to the boundaries necessary to determine local sales tax. My zip code (in most databases) incorrectly places me in an adjacent city that has a higher sales tax. I know of one zip code that is split across 3-4 cities (with at least 1 having a different sales tax). To properly determine locale in the US, you need the full address (not just the zip).
Given that Facebook and Google both pay for their "free" services by doing things with your personal data, I seriously doubt they will ever comply with GDPR in a way that most people want. If they allow people to opt out of their slurping of data then the alternative will likely be a paid service (instead of "free") - personally, I'd be happy to pay a reasonable amount for Google to have GDPR-compliant data usage (however, I'm in the US so I probably won't have that option).
I would be perfectly happy to have gmail stop ignoring dots in email addresses IF all sites actually supported valid email addresses with + in them. It still baffles me the number of email validators on many sites (including government sites) that claim + is not a valid character in an email address.
Over the years, I've gotten lots of emails for lots of people that clearly typo'd their email (and not just a dot difference). I've gotten email from lawyers, order details for an artist in CA, email from doctors, and many other probably important emails. In some cases, I did attempt to notify the sender to the error if it seemed important. By far the most annoying was somebody signing up for a TON of payday loan sites using my email address (fortunately Google sent most of them to spam even without me doing anything).
I often like EU law but the whole RTBF is ridiculous. If the original sources exist then it makes absolutely no sense to force Google to remove links to them (for many reasons). If the original sources were taken down or edited and Google still linked them then there would certainly be a case against Google. RTBF is absolutely editing history.
Also, curious, a lot of websites use Google search internally. Would RTBF ruling against Google mean that these sites would not even be able to return results for articles on their own site (assuming they are in the EU)?
"You're stating your personal opinion as if it were objective fact. It isn't -- it's just your opinion. My opinion is that both types of drivers are annoying, but the aggressive ones are far more so. And it's the aggressive ones who are more likely to endanger my physical well-being."
Actually, you are provably wrong on this one. There have been several studies recently that have shown that the too-slow, hesitant driver is actually far more likely to cause accidents than the aggressive, too-fast driver. Here's a link for a UK article on it http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2016721/Slow-drivers-dangerous-roads-cause-crashes.html
Microsoft used to give much better information on each patch (and I would read it and select which ones to install). I think this was on XP - I would even "hide" some updates which would prevent them from being installed or showing up in the list again.
Unfortunately, at some point, Microsoft apparently decided users didn't need to know what the patch was actually fixing and stopped giving any sort of information that would allow us to choose.
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