Actually, it is the best way to get through a rough neighborhood. If you can walk tall, confident, but not swaggering or strutting, you can pass right through almost anything. You do have to weave around gang-bangers, you can't crash into them, but if you maintain the right walk they usually won't even see you, you're just background. If they're also walking, they always make room for me, I only have to weave around them when they're loitering. I've done that in most major American cities, and I've never had a problem.

In fact, the places I have had problems have been small towns, usually without sidewalks. Places where it doesn't matter how you walk, because there isn't enough traffic for it to matter.

As somebody who lived in rough neighborhoods as a teen, one thing I picked up on: You're actually less likely to get shot/stabbed or randomly assaulted there. A lot of people have some means of self defense. Picking a fight could get you shot, so people don't pick fights unless you're obviously walking scared. You're unlikely to get robbed in a drug neighborhood, for example, because most people either don't have anything to steal, or have a weapon, or will fight to the death over their last $2. There are people getting robbed, but the perp knows the victim, and knows they have drugs, or knows they have money that they're trying to buy drugs with.

The neighborhood where you might get stabbed over stupid shit is usually a University Neighborhood, the same place where you're likely to be assaulted by strangers. Those high crime neighborhoods, they're stabbing/shooting people that they know, and have a real dispute with. Don't borrow/loan money, don't borrow/loan drugs, don't arrange drug deals that might go bad, etc., and they probably won't involve you.

If they maintain their lane, and just follow the traffic rules robotically then there is no problem. When I was a kid I'd walk and read a book at the same time, no problem. The problem is that people aren't following the traffic rules when they are paying attention, so when they're not paying attention they're just sortof stumbling into the street without knowing what the state is. If they're practiced in following the rules, they can do that on autopilot and they'll wait for the light to change before crossing without consciously even realizing they had stopped for it. And they'll maintain their lane, too.

I mostly agree. I refuse to negotiate over the last bit of the sidewalk on the right-hand side. If forced, I will simply stop and they can run into me, or go around. It is rare, maybe 1 in 250 people I pass, I have to stop. Maybe 1 in 50 waits until they're inside 5' before moving over. The vast majority identify that I'm in the correct lane, and move over. There is no need for negotiation unless you're doing it wrong.

Proven, you really did just show up. Give grandma her laptop back before she grounds you.

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

O M F G that is a good one. Quit while you're behind lolol

I'm not "cynical" at all, actually. That just adds to the humor. That they lie to you is the standard practice of their industry. Have you ever even seen the training materials? It isn't cynical it is top-shelf mainstream. Their job is not be moral and ethical, it is feed whatever crap their charts say will make users shut up. In many cases, well above half the callers will actually believe the crap, believe it was all their own fault, agree to faulty charges, agree to keep paying faulty charges every month. A lot of customers will agree to that just based on posturing.

It would be nice to live in a world where honestly was just assumed in customer service, but that isn't the world we live in. I always give people the benefit of the doubt; generally I'm accused of "supporting" all sorts of things that I don't support, just because I defend things when the accusations don't match the evidence. But here, the evidence actually matches standard practices that are taught in the industry.

It was a proper argument. I said, Woobles are to Blargs as Foobars are to Blaz. You obviously disagree, but you instead of trying to substantiate your own opinion, you made a faulty claim that my opinion isn't even able to be considered. I say you simply failed to understand it.

If you don't even know whose lawn this is, you're new to slashdot. Who did you buy your account from? Some kid, from the number.

I use their service on all sides, yes. I really *DO* know what it is.

Next time, just assume that. You know know you don't know, but you don't know if I know. It is a bad time to bluff. ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... There you go, now you know. ;)

In the old days we had to fiddle with log analysis tools, now google handles that. That is what you use to track visitors to your own site. That is all it is; an analytics tool. All a website finds out about you is the same things it finds out if it is running its own tool; just the stuff that comes from your IP address, like location. They use the IP data for that; google actually knows where you are more accurately than by using the IP, but that is part of their private data about you. They don't give that out. They give out the IP-based guess, the same as any other tool.

The only privacy concern is, "gosh, google knows where I clicked." That isn't somebody selling data about you, which would be a different, bigger concern.

BTW, if you really cared about your privacy, you'd already know all this.

So, you think when you hand money to somebody, some sort of analytical knowledge of their business practices is transferred by osmosis? Do you have to make all your purchases under water, or do you use a reverse-osmosis film?

LOL buying stuff doesn't enhance your ability to understand it. D'Oh!

I guess I'm just not clique-y enough to be a European. It is very odd to get to the end of that and find that sort of appeal to idiocy. You're right, I'm not a platform partisan. People that stupid should be embarrassed to admit it.

The existence of a thing called "selection bias" doesn't make experience worthless or irrelevant. It just means it isn't objective data and can't be used as such. It is perfectly reasonable to base opinions on actual experience. And indeed, if I was deep in an echo chamber where all my friends were so much the same as me that we even used the same computers, it would have little value. But if I'm not in that sort of echo chamber, then it may be that I have at least a rough idea that there is a trend that exists among some people. I only have to know some of those people to know about it. Maybe there is a larger trend in another direction, and indeed, I might miss it. So if I used that experience as objective data, or as complete data, then that would be crazy. But OTOH if I simply use it to know that such people exist, that it is a trend, then it is not bias at all; it is just the parts I'm aware of.

As to the rest, you're trying to exclude the standard meanings of the words by using other meanings, and you bait-and-switch back and forth from just talking about Steam in general and the specific clients they put out. It is true that there are different meanings of "platform" and that they overlap, but the challenge for you is to understand the meaning I used. The existence of other meanings doesn't somehow refute what I said. Re-read, keep re-reading until it is a logical point that you disagree with. Then you'll know you understood it. If it looks not only like something you disagree with, but something that is factually incorrect, keep parsing; you didn't understand it yet.

That's a rather extreme accusation, to accuse outright fraud and the faking of screenshots. You'd need some kind of evidence, but you don't have any. That you saw a different thing on your screen tells me there is some difference, perhaps geography, service level, or simply having been randomly selected to receive a different interface.

Jumping straight to accusation of fraud without evidence is despicable, and gives you no right to even use the word "prove."

I haven't gone into the weeds of their accounting, but I'm assuming they were bundling different units together before, and now they're splitting parts off. I'd expect them to reverse it in the future and re-bundle. There are tricks and games at both ends of that cycle.

There is no guarantee that a loyal customer base means profit, or that the lack of profit is mismanagement. They have products that were high margin 30 years ago, that are low margin now, and if another company has cheaper supply for geo-political reasons then they won't compete well with that product. Customers might prefer their product, might even be willing to pay extra for it, but the willingness of the customers to pay extra won't be calibrated to the actual difference in margin. It will vary by product. Also, they have to be able to make these decisions without always knowing exactly what customers will pay. With high margin products a new fad can take the wind out of your sales, but with low margin any disruption and you can be losing money, not just making less. Sony has a lot of experience at losing money, and making it.

Re-read what I said, but this time assume I know what all the words mean, I chose them on purpose, I'm over 30, and I know at least a little bit about what I'm talking about.

T-Mobile isn't Comcast, but did you know that my state has to fine Comcast multiple times per year over persistent "mistakes" in how they organize their bill? You'd think after decades of saying, "no, that's a lie, no, that is intentionally unclear, no that is a lie, etc." that they would learn to write a clear bill. And indeed, it becomes obvious eventually that none of these are mistakes or misunderstandings.

When the person on the phone doesn't know the answer, but they claim to know it and guess, and are wrong, that isn't a misunderstanding. That is somebody telling a lie. That they know the answer is the lie.

If you look at the actual accusations and the screen shots, there are numerous examples where to defend them the best you can do is say it is a smaller lie than it appears to be. But none of that makes it into misunderstandings. They didn't misunderstand, they lied about various things while at the same time also misunderstanding the (incorrect) numbers on the screen.

That you're a fan of their service overall tells you nothing at all about if it was a lie or a misunderstanding. And if you were close to my age, you'd have seen these same things from so many companies for so long, you'd realize that the workers in that call center have been dealing with these issues for decades. The guy on the phone may be new, but his boss isn't. They do actually know what they are doing. And if you also read business news, you'd know that their industry media tells them to do these things. It is a known way of doing business, to keep the customer in the dark and feed them shit. They have formal analysis that tells them it makes them more money than providing good service. That is another reason it is not believable when they pretend to accidentally do exactly the things their industry rags tell them will make them more money. They're experts in their field, and they're doing things the way they intended. And that's why so many companies are doing it exactly the same way.

You say I[sic] was wrong, but you're accusing slackware of not knowing what system they use. BSD-style is a real thing. You can't tell the difference, but they can. And AT&T could. And people that can't tell the difference probably shouldn't be pining for software that is over 30 years old. Figure out what it is first.

Or do you think, because they allow you to use a different one, that changes which one "slackware uses?" That would be daft, because Fedora still "lets" a person use SysV crap. So then all the systemd whining would be self-refuting. Usually only 3/4th of it is.

If I'm buying apples and they didn't have a certified scale, I can tell because there will be a sign that says, "sold by volume, all weights are approximate." This is one reason why roadside fruit stands often sell by the bag, basket, box, or flat, instead of by the pound.

When I buy or sell electricity or water, the meters have to be approved for that use by the state Public Utility Commission.

As an IT "expert" I have to inform you that it is you that are defending the rules being different in IT. The person you responded to is proposing that the rules be the same. It seems a straightforwards idea, and I can certify for you that no IT expertise is implicated by this idea.

The images he shows prove that there are serious bugs in the T-Mobile data tracking. Different places in their software makes different claims about the usage, and their own support workers can't even make enough sense of it to read the usage off the screen accurately.

Since I'm not him, I really don't care what his usage was. But it harms everybody in the market, including people who use a different service, when a service is being dishonest. It distorts the market. And they clearly have bugs, and honestly utilities seem to have a practice of having this exact type of "bug" even where in most industries the tracking numbers still add up, even when there is a bug. It isn't like the software double-counted something. Different parts of their software are reporting different numbers, that is very suspicious. It would be exceptionally poor engineering to actually be taking different measurements of the same thing, and using one in the phone, and the other on the website. It is the same billing account, the same billed service, so they should be tracking it in one place, storing and transmitting that data, and then displaying it in multiple places. When there is conflicting data that doesn't line up with any of the numbers, it seems really more likely that they wrote it to appear buggy, than that there is a natural bug. If it was off by a digit, or doubled, or a day behind, or something, that would make sense. But the numbers in the screenshots just don't seem to be any obvious mistake. And only some of their software seems to have this wrong idea of the numbers. Why would those parts even be trying to calculate a number, and not just displaying the same number from the database?