* Posts by bombastic bob

10507 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015

Wow, talk about a Maine-wave: US state says ISPs need permission to flog netizens' personal data

bombastic bob Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Socialism!!

as an AC you couldn't do the 'joke' icon, so I'll assume you meant this as sarcasm.

you could NOT have possibly been serious, right?

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: Why?

federal vs local - it's an ongoing problem. Although the federal laws will very likely take precedence [since it's "interstate" and "international" commerce involved here] it's obviously the will of THE PEOPLE to have privacy protection.

So Con-Grab (particularly "the Washington D.C. establishment") need to GET A FEELING CLUE and STOP IT with stupid legislation that allows companies to violate citizens' privacy. Similar with the 'can spam' act and the way the 'do not call list' has been repeatedly fumbled...

I wouldn't blame Republicans or specific U.S presidents for this. The main problem is in the "Washington D.C. establishment" which includes the 'chamber of commerce' and a LOT of well funded special interest lobbying organizations. RINO Republicans, most of the Democrats, and most of the U.S. presidents have more or less been 'on board' with these people. You can tell who was NOT on board, by the criticism that's thrown at them. In other words, who's for "the new world order" and who isn't... THAT is the litmus test! And politicians being who they are, they must bow to their masters to get elected... except for some of them, who receive criticism from ALL angles for doing the right thing.

DigitalOcean drowned my startup! 'We lost everything, our servers, and one year of database backups' says biz boss

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Idea...

considering that I'm willing to pay an extra 10 cents per gallon (sometimes, at discount stations) to use a credit card in a gasoline pump, just so I won't have to go stand in line TWICE to get gasoline AND fill up the tank AND get change back, assuming I handed the guy enough $ before I started, forking over a refundable $10 to get some human to fix your problems right away would be a GOOD thing...

it's like the phone company fixing my wires - which they've had to do several times - if the problem is inside the house, they charge you $75 for the service call. Thing is, every time it's been on their end. SO I'm willing to risk the $75 just to get the tech out to check the wires, which he generally finds are broken some place in the 10+ wire miles between me and the home office. My connection is LITERALLY at the "end of the wire". The neighbor's house has the wire literally heading the other direction.

So yeah. Good idea. If I ever get involved in tech support, I'll consider that option. Refundable $10 fee for accelerating the problem to a human's investigation.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: Putting all your eggs in one basket...

ideally these cloud providers might be creating the "lack of backup" problem by CLAIMING that you have 100% reliability "in the cloud" with backups and reliability and/or some other such thing... until their bureaucracy SCREWS YOU.

but yeah us old schoolers with 20:20 hindsight can easily say "you should have had a backup"

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Why were they locked out?

nice clarification - my skim-reading of the article missed that aspect [i.e. the 10 parallel jobs] and since THAT was all it was, D.O. should've NOT shot themselves in the foot like that. If they don't want people spawning parallel jobs, they should set some kind of limit on that kind of thing, total CPU percentage, total number of jobs/threads, yotta yotta.

(effecitvely) banning them entirely was a HUGE mistake.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Flame

"We now have to explain to our clients, Fortune 500 companies why we can’t restore their account."

well, at least it appears that it STILL HELPS to GO PUBLIC when normal channels fail to get the needed attention...

and that the ultimate problem is bureaucracy and bureaucratic attitudes.

but yeah, having a local backup can be your ONLY salvation. a little over a week ago, a different contractor was supposed to commit his changes to github so that I could integrate it. If it wasn't bad enough that this guy took 2 weeks to do 2-3 days' worth of stuff [my opinion, or how long would it take ME to have done it], and we'd been after him the entire time to at least commit SOMETHING to the repo, he managed [with some GUI tool on a Mac] to WIPE OUT all of my significant changes and additions over the last 2 days when he uploaded his stuff to github (in effect, syncing up his private repo with the one on github, literally). ONLY because I'd had the foresight to have done a 'git pull' on my home machine before leaving, and having the ability to ssh in and grab a tarball of what the repo was 2 hours earlier, was I able to quickly fix this. a simple 'revert' probably would've left things in a worse state than a) tarball a snapshot, b) re-do the 'git clone' c) untar everything I did, d) git commit+push, and THEN have the other guy (one at a time) check in the files he worked on. I think that my method was faster, at any rate.

So yeah it helps to have some LOCAL backups, on multiple machines, just for things *like* this.

Oh yeah that particular contractor was given the "thank you very much for your hard work and effort" letter. I won't go into the other drama that preceded it, involving slack and a literal 'commit war' over a 3 day weekend when way too many things needed to be ready on Tuesday AM for review, 99% of it my effort for "last minute, because, THAT guy" integration purposes.

(ok vent complete)

Sex and drugs and auto-tune: What motivates a millennial perp?

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: 30 Years Ago

"almost every new form of media becomes a vehicle to deliver porn."

like rule 34

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

I heard that certain STDs, particularly gonorrhea, originated with sheep, or perhaps THESE. online research suggests it's just an urban legend...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Well there might be a bright side

"less 1st-worlders using much too many resources and polluting the world."

*facepalm*

Without enough babies being born to create the next generation, nobody is going to PAY FOR your arthritis treatments. It'll become SO expensive to 'take care of' the aging population that any kind of 'austerity' for the 'old and retired' will get shoved under the bus. Run the numbers, you'll see. The only way that you'll get your arthritis treatments at age 80 is if you have private retirement, assuming it's not confiscated and/or taxed out of existence. That is, unless millenials "get busy" and start making babies...

(but millenials are too busy texting each other on their 4-inch screens)

If sex weren't so damned pleasurable, nobody would EVER have kids. Then humans would die off. But someone with the attitude as seen in the above quote might actually LIKE that outcome...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: S.H.A.G.-13

well I'd like to point out that the desire for robo-sexuality (in general) could be explained with the term '3DPD'.

You have to ask yourselves _WHY_ the '3DPD' term even exists. A great deal of it comes from radical feminism and the general attitude towards men, the "all men are toxic masculine" (by defining normal male behavior as 'toxic', not simply the rude ass-hattery that's a stereotype of normal male behavior).

So from THAT perspective, when an overwhelming number of 'available' females are of the "bitch princess from hell you owe me because you have a penis" variety, robots look PRETTY DAMN GOOD.

Ultimately you can blame Gloria Steinem, Patricia Ireland,Irina Dunn (the originator of "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle") and others who have gone beyond equal rights for women into the realm of outright man-hating and "misandrony".

So what do men do? ROBOTS! And porn. And hookers. And go to other (non-westernized) countries.

(for those women who really DO want men in their lives, and not a Big Member 3000, consider NOT listening to those over-the-top radical feminist HARPIES and behaving NORMALLY, like 100,000+ years of human evolution defining the traditional roles and behavior of men and women have people do, and men will not only respect you, but probably not do things that anger you either; otherwise you'll play 2nd fiddle to the Lucy Liu-bots that are only COPIES of you, except without all of the "toxic femininity")

sad-face icon because, let's face it, this is sad.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

politicians and other scammers

thumbs up for that one

bombastic bob Silver badge
Happy

Re: Boston Dynamics in the year 3000

I'd prefer the Lucy Liu bot

Introducing 'freedom gas' – a bit like the 2003 deep-fried potato variety, only even worse for you

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Sleep is a Good Thing(TM)

sorry, I happen to have some proof right here:

http://nov79.com/gbwm/atmo.html

The temperatures corresponding to the absorbed energies are generally temperatures NOT found on earth, and even if they were, you'd see the energy released again. CO2 is not forming a blanket, it's not stopping heat from radiating into space, but there _IS_ ONE gas that DOES do all of that, and nobody wants to control it...

Wanna know what THAT gas is? WATER VAPOR. By my estimates, it has about 100 times the effect of CO2. And there's SO MUCH of it, too. On a cloudy night you see warmer temperatures, and you see colder temperatures on a cloudy day. it couldn't be more obvious that WATER _IS_ a GREENHOUSE GAS.

but the planet isn't going into meltdown because of water, now is it?

I just thoght I'd point that one out. I'd laugh SO hard if some warmist/alarmist insisted that WATER VAPOR must be limited in industrialized nations because of "climate change".

bombastic bob Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Sleep is a Good Thing(TM)

"Carbon dioxide absorbs long-wave infrared radiation. That means it doesn't block sunlight during the day time that warms places on the Earth, but it does block those places from radiating heat back out into space during the night time"

The FIRST part is right. CO2 is _INVISIBLE_ to IR energies that correspond to temperatures between about -50F and about 140 or 150F. That means, for REAL temperatures that exist on earth, their black body radiation energies are TRANSPARENT as far as CO2 is concerned.

So first part, CORRECT. 2nd part, PURE BULLSHIT. Because CO2 does NOT absorb those energies, that's why. Your sources are WRONG. _I_ have done the research, so _I_ know.

And, YOU can do the SAME research if you want... just avoid warmist/alarmist propaganda, and stick to REAL science.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Sleep is a Good Thing(TM)

"I hate to break it to you but people are cutting down forests at an unprecedented rate"

And re-planting trees where they once were and turning the wood into houses, baseball bats, pianos, guitars, furniture, and works of art in general. Works for me!

Most of the earth's CO2 and O2 is exchanged via ALGAE anyway. Besides, when you spew alleged facts like that, why should we believe YOU?

bombastic bob Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Sleep is a Good Thing(TM)

if it's warmer, then CO2 levels WILL be higher... NOT because CO2 levels are CAUSING "the warm" but because "the warm" CAUSES the higher CO2!!!!!

soda can. gets warm. goes flat. Duh. CO2 not held in water any more as temperature goes up. Cold soda holds more CO2. Warm soda releases it. Same with the earths oceans. Duh.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Sleep is a Good Thing(TM)

How else do you explain why the extremely high levels of CO2 identified tens of thousands of years ago, far higher than today's concentrations, did not result in an irreversible climate catastrophe?

High CO2 concentrations can be explained by HIGH TEMPERATURES, but not the other way around, as the oceans' capacity to store CO2 varies according to temperature, just like the way a soda goes flat as it gets warmer. This is due to the solubility vs temperature of various gasses in water, plus the equilibrium reaction of CO2+H20 <==> HCO3 + OH (and others)

Yeah I had chemistry classes a while back. I still remember it. This is also why most climate change B.S. is so laughably irrational, because NOBODY who really understands chemistry and physics could POSSIBLY buy into that unless there's money (or a political agenda) involved.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Happy

Re: Sleep is a Good Thing(TM)

"As the CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the overall "greenness" of the planet increases"

Correct. "Biological equilibrium". And greenhouse growers have been spiking the air with CO2 for DECADES to make things GROW FASTER...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Sleep is a Good Thing(TM)

"CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It traps heat from the Sun in the atmosphere"

So you say. how does it do that? *crickets chirp* because _I_ know the answer you WANT to give, and yet, the infrared absorption spectrum of CO2 says _OTHERWISE_. You know, black body radiation... how heat transfer into outer space works, what the CO2 allegedly "traps", and so forth. Can't trap what it's INVISIBLE to now, can it? Check it out, you'll maybe get a "light bulb" moment.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Sleep is a Good Thing(TM)

"Oh, OK, perhaps the climate is changing for the worse"?

at least 70 years of conclusive data. That's about the same length of one of the major temperature cycles in the northern hemisphere, by the way.

You know, the one that made 1900 cold, 1935 hot, 1970 cold, 2005 hot, etc. (see the pattern? Obvious to anyone without a bias)

Then there's the 500 year cycle, you know, 1000 AD warm [hence GREENland got its name], 1500 warm [dunno about 1250, haven't seen any info on that really, but the vikings had trouble with cooling temperatures in Greenland and the Nova Scotia area shortly after they were discovered during a warm period], 1750 was VERY cold (Thames freezover, Valley Forge winter for G. Washington at around that time period] and 2000 of course, VERY warm

That's TWO observable temperature cycles coinciding at around the year 2000. Is that NOT compelling enough? Well, I guess _YOU_ must be a NATURAL TEMPERATURE CYCLE "denier" because THAT evidence goes back THOUSANDS of years and is INTUITIVELY OBVIOUS to even the most CASUAL observer, as long as that observer HAS A BRAIN and no pre-conceived notions to the contrary...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

the stinky gasses generally contain sulfur, i.e. H2S, and any 'thi-ol' compound which has an S instead of an O in forming an alcohol...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Also...

I was a bit unhappy about the 'freedom fries' thing [I think it was mostly Demo[n,c][r,R]ats resopnsible for that one]. I thought there was way too much irritating slogan-ing going on out there and France has been an ally of the USA since its beginning.

However, the availability of energy IS a form of freedom, particularly freedom of movement. So there's at least some truth in that argument...

[I honestly think this whole attack on CO2, and all of the proposed "solutions" for reducing it, are a way of preventing people from moving about freely, keeping us in our places where we can be more easily controlled, keep the classes separated by a wider gap, make us more reliant on government services to keep the politicians in power, and so on, seriously]

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: My main regret ...

link tossing - the way a religious fanatic tosses scripture references. Just as irritating, yeah.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: My main regret ...

You forgot to include the emission of "smug"

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Sleep is a Good Thing(TM)

what nightmare are we waking up from?

Please explain in layman's terms [in a manner that's possible to actually discuss, we all know how to use google] why it is that CO2 is bad for the planet, and why the USA needs to reduce its CO2 output more than countries like China?

Kthnx. I'll be ready with my infrared absorption spectrum curves and some physics facts regarding the solubility of gas in water vs temperature to rebut it all, including ice core measurements and a nice 10,000 year temperature chart available on wikipedia. [but those things are google-able as well, so I'm more inclined at this point to just mention them and let people decide if they wanna go for it]

But yeah, discussibility being the point here, ANYone can throw links the way a bible thumper throws scripture references, and all it does is make the link-thrower smug and self-satisfied. If you've ever been on the receiving end of a "Hezekiah 1:1" argument from a religious person then you'll see the direct comparison.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Joke

Re: Freedom Gas...

setting the gas "free" can be entertaining. Sometimes I poot out "shave and a haircut"

(2 belches for the final cadence)

'Evolution of the PC ecosystem'? Microsoft's 'modern' OS reminds us of the Windows RT days

bombastic bob Silver badge
FAIL

seems to me that MS needs to get back on the boat before it leaves them behind for the last time...

They continue to judge things wrongly, that is, using "new sales" statistics instead of "user base" statistics. That, and marketing surveys among the FANBOIS. "Representative sample" makes more sense, ya know? And I don't mean identity demographics, either...

And they seem to fall for the same trap that led to the end result of (fictional) failure in Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority".

They "feel" instead of think, and end up with a bunch of MILLENIAL CHILDREN running the show, particularly with respect to the overall design concepts and "take it OUR way, we know better" attitude, so typical of "4 incher" thinking [or lack of thinking].

Everything is not "a phone" or "a phone app". But if you study what MS has done over the last few years, they obviously *FEEL* as if it is. And of course, like FEELINGS usually are, it's *WRONG*.

They go with this 2D FLATTY McFLATFACE FLATSO look, and EVEN WHEN IT IS OBVIOUS that PEOPLE PREFER THE OLD LOOK by a 2:1 margin, they allow the VERY vocal minority to get THEIR way, while SIMULTANEOUSL PREVENTING THE REST OF US from having OUR way, too.

They ARROGANTLY force ADVERTISING onto your computer desktop, SPY ON YOU, force you into RIDICULOUS EULA's to ALLOW all of this, and CRAM NEW UPDATES/FEATURES automatically onto your computer, whether want them or NOT.

So what about any of THAT has change? Nothing, apparently.

Micro-shaft: shut up and eat your FAIL. And then, GET ON BOARD with REALITY, and go back to something closer to Windows 7. Or XP. Or 2000. OK ?

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: If wishes were horses, beggars would ride

wait just a minute, they're promising:

"the update experience is deterministic, reliable, and instant with no interruptions"

And you KNOW that MIcro-shaft would NEVER lie about that!!!

Germany mulls giving end-to-end chat app encryption das boot: Law requiring decrypted plain-text is in the works

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Mystified; how will they force it?

" It's possible to load whatever you want on some Android phones, but most of the targets won't know how or otherwise won't do it."

a) make an APK available for download directly on a web site

b) include instructions of the hoops you have to jump through to make it work

developers know what these are [being necessary to test things] and it's not all that difficult, but later versions of Android make it, well, "hoopy". You have to do it JUST right, and you'll get a prompt to let it install the application anyway, and after that, it'll install any updated versions without the prompting. But yeah you have to get past that one part, which is LESS difficult now than ever, if you do it in the right order at any rate...

https://www.wikihow.tech/Install-APK-Files-on-Android

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: Mystified; how will they force it?

not only is your bias showing, the ignorance is showing, too. Pull up your pants, please.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Honey, we're out of

"butter is first on the list."

Wait until the FOOD POLICE found out you're eating REAL BUTTER which means FAT in your diet, and they know better than YOU how much you should (or should not) be eating...

As for me I eat butter as a SNACK - like potato chips, only it's butter chips.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Big Brother

We in the USA _ALREADY_ have examples of "this sort of thing" happening when you look at FISA court abuse as an example of "mission creep".

It starts out "we have a court we want to use for due process to do spying, because, TERRORISM" and "it will only be on foreign operators using our networks". Then it becomes "and persons of interest engaging with foreign operators on our networks". Then it becomes "and persons of interest but here's legitimate evidence that gives us probable cause."

And then it becomes PURELY FABRICATED ELECTION PROPAGANDA presented as "evidence" by the FBI to a FISA judge, and then it's SIGNED OFF by that judge so that a U.S. citizen working for a presidential campaign can be spied upon by the FBI, by court order, in order to dig up dirt on a candidate to apparently be used against him in some way later on... like in a 2 year long "investigation" about alleged collusion with a foreign government, that _NEVER_ _HAPPENED_ but allegations are enough for "the press" to bad-mouth this politician INDEFINITELY in order to drive elections "their way"!

"Mission Creep" indeed. Big brother icon, of course.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: So encrypted posts to USENET it is ...

you have identified, in principle, what will end up happening: only "illegal" encryption will be used, particularly by the bad guys.

It is SO easy to do your own encryption with something as simple as PGP. "send me your public key, here is my public key". etc.. What are "they" going to do, stop you from downloading an application for your Android device that's a simple APK on "some web site" that uses the TOR network or something like that? Ha ha ha good luck with THAT one...

and of course, you could also use temporal public/private keys that are only good for one message each... and are thrown away on a regular basis, so there's no record of what they were. Even if "not that strong" if the amount of data being encrypted by "that one key" is very very small. And so on.

No doubt someone has already written something that could do this, and maybe has even made it available for download. If not, someone probably will... someone NOT in the EU, someone willing to post it online in a public forum and "let the cat out of the bag" kinda like what happened with PGP.

Facebook removes about as many fake accounts as it has actual monthly users (yes, billions) in effort to clean up online

bombastic bob Silver badge
Pirate

Re: More than 2.2 billion fake accounts were removed in the quarter

as already mentioned, I bet a bunch of those fake accounts were created so people could view things on FB without being tracked...

Just do a one-time e-mail/password verification via a '10 minute e-mail' service. voila! Then, view whatever content you might want to view [do informal background checks on new girlfriend for example, using a public wifi] and nobody will ever know it was you...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Verify users

"Social media sites above a certain size should be forced to verify user ID. (Good for targeted advertising too)."

See, THAT is the reason there are so many 'fake' accounts. because when you log in to view a site, there's a record of YOU viewing the site. So if you want some anonymity, you create a FAKE ACCOUNT and then view the site. And then you forget you created it, what the password is, etc. because you used one of those '10 minute e-mail' services to create the login anyway...

FB's own policies have CREATED that problem.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

"hate speech" => "speech that I don't like" or "speech that hurts my feelings" or "speech that upsets me"

that was more or less my initial reaction. thanks for saying it.

That's a hell of Huawei to run a business, Chinese giant scolds FedEx after internal files routed via America

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

glass house, stones

"use your local or national post/package service."

heh, then they definitely WILL open it up to have a look.

There's something to be said about Huawei being inside of a glass house, throwing stones

bombastic bob Silver badge
Pint

Re: Check the label...

after a few of these, sure

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: pun violation

The original was a bit better as far as PUNishment goes

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: "Inadvertently misrouted." Wow, that's what I call a spectacular display of contempt.

I bet it was simply like what might happen to checked luggage - occasionally, it goes onto a different plane, and when that happens, might go to timbuktu before arriving at your destination. If they get it right, you will never know it happened...

While big orange spectre haunts certain Chinese firms, fiscal '19 treated Lenovo rather well

bombastic bob Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Dependant state.

"We would get them from Taiwan"

and other places, INCLUDING MEXICO. Last I read it was becoming FAR more economical to have labor-intensive things done in Mexico rather than China, and tariffs would make this even MORE so.

And Mexico appears to respect our intellectual property. Unlike China.

"Trump's base of supporters would have no new shiny toys"

I have to wonder if the "shiny new toy" crowd consists MOSTLY of Anti-Trump'ers, just sayin'.

And those who can actually AFFORD 'shiny new toys' are probably not going to be affected much by an increase in tariffs for goods and stuff [or an outright embargo for that matter] as would those whose JOBS LITERALLY WENT TO THE FAR EAST and are NOW coming BACK!

Want to train a dragon? You'll need 500 million files, 730TB of data, 54,000 CPU cores...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Coat

Re: Files

/var/log/complaints.log

it's a symlink to /dev/null

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: 730TB of data and 54,000 CPUs

and that future phone, with all of it's CPU cores, RAM, and computing power, will still have a 2D FLATTY interface, allegedly because it "wastes CPU cycles" to make it 3D Skeuomorphic... (whether people PREFER the 3D or not, and every study _I_ have seen says it's about 2:1 in favor of the 3D-like appearance of things as far back as Windows 3 and OS/2 PM 1.2...)

and people will STILL use their uber-powerful smart phones just to look at cat videos, e-mail, and the next gen of Fa[e][cebook. And maybe a game app or two...

meanwhile, Dreamworks would hopefully settle for an integrated solution where all xxx,xxx cores can work with one another gracefully. And probably running Linux, or a BSD or Solaris derivative OS...

thinking of 'mythical man month' there's 'mythical CPU core count increase' too, for determining how effective a 'moore's law' architecture evolution is when you can't just double the frequency any more.

Activist shareholders to target Zuck with giant angry emoji inflatable at Facebook AGM

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Separate CEO and Board Chair

this would make a lot of sense. One is responsible to the board of directors and the shareholders, for making investments good, futures bright, and shareholders generally happy. The other runs the company. In a successful scenario there's collaboration between them but neither overrides the other [however the board CAN replace the CEO if he's totally screwed up]

While Zuck remains "majority vote" in the boardroom, he can also dictate policy as CEO. So basically it's a DICTATORSHIP as things are now. basically he's like Saddam Hussein or Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez or Kim Jon Un or Mao Tse Tung...

bombastic bob Silver badge
IT Angle

Re: Who?

nothing wrong with making money. however, HOW you make it is an ethical issue

bombastic bob Silver badge
Coat

Re: !#$%*^!$%

if you use your imagination, I'm showing you MY 'inflatable emoji' - ha ha ha ha ha.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: You're missing the point.

uh not the same thing as tobacco... though tobacco in the US has been legal forever, built the economy in states like Virginia. Only since the 1960's has there been a push towards regulating tobacco and advertisements for tobacco products. But as long as people are informed, they should still be able to buy this stuff if they want (just don't smoke it near me or upwind of where I'm at)

As for Fa[e]ceBook, same idea. What you need to look at with them is really the obvious, that is ABuse of personal information, and the GENERAL LACK of full disclosure on this.

If use of data were 'opt in' only, for example, some people might want it, but it's likely MOST people would not. FB should sell the idea of an opt-in system, and make it happen and give users total control of what's disclosed (and to whom) and then nobody should complain, because that's what 'full disclosure' is all about. "Oh yeah our product is addicting, and we track you everywhere, but these are the benefits. Interested?"

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: You're missing the point.

what hurts "moving away" the most is that you [basically] have to LOG IN TO FA[e]CEBOOK to VIEW FACEBOOK PAGES, or at least that's been MY observation, always not being able to see them because I refuse to create an F-book login.

yeah sometimes a search engine will return F-book links. Disappointing, but that's how it works.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: You're missing the point.

"it should be regulated as such."

whatever it is, their use of private citizens' data and the apparent lack of disclosure and "informed consent" seems to beg for some kind of legal action at the very least.

Regulatory agencies are basically there so that individuals don't have to go through the expense of lawsuits [class action or otherwise] for abusive, predatory, or outright illegal actions by a business, whether towards the customers, or towards the competition, or both.

However I fear that "regulation" might be like the 'can spam' act was a few years back, which had NOTHING to do with STOPPING spam, but instead ALLOWS it under some broad-brush conditions...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no ,no ,no, no .....

the title to this thread reminds me of the movie 'Little Nicky' where Little Nicky's brothers (spoiler alert?) were inside of a flask just before the devil "did something" with them... heh heh heh heh