My Epson ran out of scanner ink, couldn't scan anything until I bought more cartridges.

This looks like it might actually be a good product. I clicked "buy" and it actually has a caution about the sizing... and recommends I go to a "Microsoft Store", whatever that is. I guess I should look for one.

Could Ballmer have been so bad for MS that we forgot they could produce good products?

I'm going to check it out, but I simply can't believe it will be acceptable until version 3.

Degree inflation.

Google Wave could have stuck around as a D&D app.

I like these projects, they have a "throw it on the wall and see if it sticks." None of it is going to stick, but we'd never have had Clippy or Comic Sans if it wasn't for MS Bob.

... on second thought, MS shouldn't try to innovate.

Steve Job was friends with Steve Wozniac, they're two normal guys who get a lot of strange mail. They live next to Mike Roe, the founder of Mikeroesoft.

It wasn't long ago that South Korea wasn't so advanced, and Daewoo was corrupt.

The national identity has been trying to raise standards in everything, but it still has horrible reminders of its recent past. The Sewoul disaster where hundreds died needlessly, the subway crash where 200 people died, the recent collapse of a sidewalk grate where 16 concert goers just... died.

By "national identity" I mean the health, safety and anticorruption standards are considered part of the national identity and distinct from the standards of many neighbouring countries.

In the past 20 years Korea has been rebuilding everything and has good standards. These stories are making the country obsessive over safety and quality, but there's still junk from the recent past, or people who are wrapped in nepotism and corruption who shouldn't be responsible for anything involving public safety, but can't be removed.

As long as the ship builders are not part of that past, then it's a boon for the country and another milestone for Korea's advancement.

"The day I found out you can use a 1x1 transparent GIF to fill any space by using "width=xx, height=yy" in the tag, was the greatest day of my life."

Things will get better.

It's kind of insane that the unions are such a burden to transit, that it's easier to accept the safety risks and enormous costs of driverless trains than to accept a non-union driver.

haha, sorry to hit a nerve.

I'm speaking from the marketer's perspective, and totally hypothetically. I'm pretty sure I've got what you're saying: you want nothing to do with them because they've already violated your trust.

They're already keeping a profile on you. It's probably renewing with your IP and cookies and not actually linked to your identity. You're already contributing to your profile by blocking ads. You've said to them that their medium is so offensive and useless to you that you're doing everything in your power to avoid it.

They know there are lots of people who do this. Right now your search results are tainted with SEO crap and reviews are stacked with shills. The advertisers are trashing your information sources to try to sell you stuff. The only reason you would buy anything from them would be because you couldn't find the information you were looking for and took a shot at thier product out of frustration.

It's only a matter of time before the ad blockers stop working. Many ads are already included as part of the content and are difficult to filter. Some sites detect adblockers and refuse to show their content. It's not technically complex to circumvent all adblockers. Don't serve the ads from the CDN, but instead have the server embed it in the CMS, and randomize some of the content.

I'm just suggesting that they may have never lost your trust if they gave you good content about their products rather than limiting themselves to car-commercial and magazine-like mindless impressions.

IMHO, this should be part of your profile. When it comes time for you to purchase something, instead of getting some flashy ad in your face, you would get a pile of specs veted by a third party.

If the product doesn't stand up to comparison in the specs, then they shouldn't bother advertising to you. If the product does stand up, it's an easy sell and well worth the effort for them to send you the ad.

Instead... sadly, they send you crap and you fight to tell them that you're not interested in their jingle, bluster or shiny copy.

Bill Gates? is that you?

You get administrative rights, it's in the Checkpoint report in the article: http://www.checkpoint.com/blog...

Analysis by Check Point security researchers revealed how this particular vulnerability could be exploited by attackers:
1.The bug enables unknown users to gain administrative privileges
2.By using these admin credentials, attackers can then view and edit private and undisclosed bug details. Software bug tracking data is typically closely guarded as it exposes software vulnerabilities and known issues
3.Furthermore, this access allows attackers to exploit design weaknesses, or even irreversibly destroy bug data, slowing down development

And have info about their disclosure:

September 29th – Vulnerability discovered and verified by Check Point security researchers
September 30th – Report submitted to the Bugzilla team
September 30th – Acknowledgement and confirmation of vulnerability and severity received by Mozilla
September 30th – Bugzilla team privately shared preliminary patch with prominent Bugzilla installations
October 6th – Security advisory and final patch released

The Checkpoint article is a lot more professional than the Krebs article No jabs at FOSS either.

This looks like a major company which uses FOSS (IIRC, SPLAT is a Linux-based-platform) made a contribution in discovering a vulnerability in common software.

Point taken. My outrage is misdirected.

Mariott + jamming hotspots filled me with rage.

This shit is why I strongly prefer AirBnB or other alternative forms of hospitality.

I was at a hotel in London and found out that "Free wifi" meant it was freely available to reach the paid gateway. Sleezery seems to be in all large chains in large cities. You would think the high premium on staying there, and the economy of scale of the size of the hotel would mean that it's easier to provide good service to guests.

By contrast, with AirBnB you'll probably get secure, unrestricted residential wifi, or even an ethernet jack to plug into. Sure you might not, and you might not get a clean place. But there's no guarantee of cleanliness at the Mariott either, and you're certain not to get a free Internet connection.

Oh and it's actually amazing at adding columns of numbers. No need to take your eyes off the paper. E.g., "What's 34+52+1324+53+6+23+11+43..."?

For smaller calculations, it's ridiculous.