Posts by Technological Viking 29 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Sep 2013
In order to address complaints that desktop users had because their desktop was uncomfortable and more suited to a tablet, Microsoft decided to push these fixes onto the same OS that the tablet was running! Whereas tablet users had limited complaints and merely wanted minor tweaks and increased options, MS really seems to have missed the mark here.
The term cyberbullying was beaten until it fit any bad act online, then dragged out into the public by massive media corporations so that they could make people fear the Internet when it was in its infancy. They had a lot of money to lose if the general population started going to blogs or news aggregates to get their information and entertainment, so they fought a hard battle to make sure their audiences were at least hesitant to spend too much time on the web. They obviously have either lost or compromised for the most part, but cyberbullying still exists as a concept, even when it's completely unrelated to physical bullying and should be treated extremely differently. If it's harassment, call it harassment and treat it as such legally. If the Internet was a tool in harassment, say as much, don't try to change the definition of the act because a term was repeated too frequently for too long.
Side note: original cyber bullies were typically those that suffered at the hands of physical bullies and were able to use the Internet to turn that psychological torment on their physical aggressors. They didn't want the people that had power over them in meatspace to be on things like MySpace.
Comcast (yeah, I'll name names) noticed and then outright admonished me for changing the default username and password for a small *business class* router while I was on the phone with a technician to troubleshoot a tunneling issue. It's disappointingly common for manufacturers and support groups to pretend like using their default username and password both set to "login" for longer than 30 seconds after turning the device on is an acceptable practice.
Worse yet than the fact that it's a flat tax, the argument for continuing the flat fee in the first place is that it can further people and propel them out of their squalorous lives! Tail-eating logic being fed by disingenuous leeches to pants-on-head regulators that will eat it up.
Then again, I'm American and am pretty offended by the way our federal government leverages our local law enforcement against us using our money to force the locals to do something they didn't want to originally... Glass houses and all that.
They're trying to break the record for waiting the longest for a Jesusphone, but Apply hasn't announced it yet? So, what happens when the event on the 9th says "We're releasing this phone THIS WEEKEND! There are also five units available for purchase here right now!"? The Rays wait for two weeks, fail to set the record, aren't even the first to get it, and still look like buffoons. I really hope Apple knows how to troll this hard.
To be fair, I went with four 1.5TB WD Blacks two years ago without even trying the Seagates deliberately because of the gripes about failure rates. My Blacks came shipped in literally nothing but a cardboard box and some rigid cardstock spacers and I haven't had a hiccup yet.
This ruling simply guarantees that another image like it won't ever see the light of day again. If somebody can't capitalize on it, they won't spend the time/effort/money to set it up and won't bother to broadcast (faux publish?) it if it happens by chance. There's just so little incentive to. Say a website gets set up (www.animalselfies.com, even though I'm sure that's taken already) that makes money by aggregating these public domain images. The only way they could get anything for their trouble would be to inject more ads into it than it costs to run. We know that site would be bollocks and a half and wouldn't last. The USCO, by making this declaration (regardless of your opinion of it) that this and future images are in the public domain and belong to everybody has driven a nail in the coffin and made damn sure that instead of everybody having these images... nobody will, because they won't get made.
The Feds know that a lot of what they purchase is of questionable origin, but they'll only do anything about it when it starts to become embarrassing. However, this regulatory practice is particularly awkward because Samsung (or whoever) manufactures these things in China because it costs them less money, and they can reduce the price that they sell the items for. So, logically, the Feds get upset over paying less, and then get more money back from the company, using the taxpayer dollars to pay for the court process until a deal is struck. *But*, with such a low total, I think this winds up being some sort of clumsy, tail-eating wash that just kind of evaporates.
The boffins weren't previously accusing the dinos of having bare flesh; it was between feathers and scales, so I don't think we should go bringing humans into a discussion on dinosaurs. We t̶e̶n̶d̶e̶r̶l̶o̶i̶n̶s̶ tend to not do too well when compared to them. Modern day lizards do have some strange external exposure, however.
The model of employment that requires a customer service representative to be bad at customer service in order to get paid enough to drink their misery about their job away is the best way to convince people that yes, Comcast literally is as bad as everybody already suspects.
Hello, fine citizen. Please opt out of our service if you do not want to use it. We will place a cookie on your machine that would get cleared out whenever you delete other cookies. You don't do something so foolish as to clear your cookies, though, right? That's for people that don't want stupid tracking enabled on them. So to opt out of our tracking, please use this cookie.
Thank you for visiting our webpage, Robert Blackman of Arlington Virginia with IP address 72.131.60.243 from Comcast Cable! Please say "hi" to your Facebook friends Charles LeBlanc and Ricky Chavez for us!
While I am a customer of Netflix and was convinced that Verizon was a group of digital gangsters as many as six years ago, one must be objective about public claims like this. Netflix has direct customers that are unhappy with their service, and they blame Verizon and provide understandable but not entirely provable graphics and metrics to point the finger. Verizon similarly has direct customers and needs to maintain its reputation, so it responds to such allegations with slightly less understandable and even less provable graphics and metrics backed up by a legion of attorneys ready to take Netflix to court. Both companies have customer bases to keep happy and both blame each other without a *real* way of us determining whose fault it might be (as much as I was already more than happy to blame Verizon, see "digital gangsters" above); looks like a Mexican stand-off.
Then, the white hat Level 3 rides in on the white horse and declares that Verizon is to blame! With no direct customer base to speak of, I would say they're far more believable than either of the two providers. Plus, you know, anybody else pointing a finger at Verizon is probably right in my book.
The favorite trick I've picked up recently to deal with offensively restrictive secret question fields is to provide a similarly offensive answer. "What is your mother's maiden name?" is answered by something like "Sod off and ask me something better". Should even this get compromised, this guarantees that the guy trying to social engineer a password reset instantly infuriates the representative on the phone and will be grilled with even more scrutiny and suspicion. Win-win.
So a tech company that's been hiring on merit is encouraged (read:threatened) by congress members to increase its diversity. What's the only way to increase diversity? By looking at the most superficial aspects of employees and making uneducated and offensive assumptions, of course!
"Oh, hello person with a different skin tone. You must be diverse from me, because there's no way you and I could be similar!"
"I see you're a gender or sexuality other than my own. Clearly that impacts your psyche, education, background, and way of life, because we're soooo different from each other! Why would you and I ever be equal? We must be different!"
Why is it that people that push so much for diversity and equality don't see that the assumptions that they make regarding superficial things are actually promoting schisms?
"Here I am, holding the glass. I will stab towards my hand, hoping that the glass does not deflect the blade directly into my fleshy bits."
"And now here I am torquing the glass in such a manner that a failure would splatter my soft, nerve-ending-filled fingertips and palms with shrapnel."
It truly must be a Jesus phone, because it's a miracle this man didn't injure himself.
Of course, this doesn't have anything to do with AT&T getting upset that Legere was calling them out for immoral business practices so very recently. To be perfectly frank, I don't think anybody is on the side of the consumer here. There isn't enough competition to allow for a serious diversity of choice depending on geography, hardware preferences, etc, and the watchdog agencies that decide to sue for more fair practices are just causing the companies to pass the cost of lawsuits and "oversight" straight to the already locked in consumer.
Regardless of the clear bias and stupidity in the report, I bet an objective analysis of many workstations would turn up some alarming results if we used the vendors' definitions of legitimacy. As an administrator myself, I have to admit that I have placed Flash on a shared folder and installed it on PCs without visiting the Adobe website. Since I didn't declare to Adobe that I was an IT manager and go through their hoops of being given the right to share their .exe, any installations that happened from my centralized shared folder, or installations from the .exe that I put on a USB drive, or if we stretch it some more, any installations from the basic image that I built and deployed, violated their terms.
At the time of writing this comment, the website bounced me around between English and Spanish. I don't have any international settings or conduct business in (or speak, for that matter) any language other than English, but links on an English page took me to a Spanish page and vice versa. There were also recursive links on a couple of pages that were a link right back to the page they were on. I left slightly frightened.
I hold an elected position within the local county party (vice chairman) and stupid calls to arms like this are why I can't appear to be a rational person to anybody that understands the issues. The party takes its stance on something (in this case "pro-business/anti-regulation") and applies it without thinking, but still wanting to sound intelligent. The declaration that this would cause a reduction in *investment* capital is almost deceptive. The investment capital would cease going towards *connection* providers who are making enough shiploads of cash to purchase each other off and would start going to *content* providers, who actually then reinvest it into content *producers*, which then creates a product. The only way that investment capital would properly be used if it was going to connection providers would be an increase in the overall infrastructure throughout the nation, but we know that that hasn't been happening with any sort of rationality (live in a large community, here's 30Mbs shared, live in a different community that's the same size, well, we happened to upgrade that in the past 10 years so here's 30Mbs dedicated) or future-looking attitude. The lack of competition is preventing a market from demanding anything different, so the ISPs can continue to rake in boatloads *without* having to make that infrastructure investment that the Republicans pretend would be threatened by such regulation.
TL;DR Republicans are supposed to be pro-free market, but these chuckleheads have convinced themselves that they are anti-regulation instead, even when the free market is being destroyed by the lack of regulation.
A truly self respecting hipster (which, of course, is one that avidly swears he is not a hipster, and does so without any trace of irony in his voice) would totally want to buy one of these! Nobody else would be willing to wear them in public and they can correct people that ask if they like their Google Glass.
I can't get over these two things:
The information he was carrying described the actions and policy of "the government". If he was found to have been carrying information contrary to "the law", does that mean that those actions and policies of the government violate the law?
The fact that the united western governments were able to get the information out of him is being used as proof that he is unable to keep such information out of the hands of terrorists. So are the suits admitting that they're terrorists?
Somebody needs to be taught what Serendipity means. I actually have a combination of Google (through YouTube) and serendipity (and that is the word I've used) to thank for my current musical choices, but I clicked on the band while logged in to somebody else's account and I did so specifically because I thought it would be so bad it would be funny. I was wrong and I loved it, but I NEVER would have been exposed to it if I had allowed YouTube to pick my likes for me. It was proper, whimsical serendipity that brought me to it, not an analysis of what I liked and would like in the future.
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