My phone does this, it's called "Speaker mode"

Seriously, saying "fiber optic cables from thin air" is an idiotic statement. IR remotes have been doing this for decades, and using lasers to do so has also been done for ages.

...that's all I need, an avatar to browbeat me for an hour over my poor credit history that is partially due to my poorly-paid job working on a government contract.

HP has over 317,000 employees, thanks in large part to acquisitions - Microsoft is no different here.

Lots of redundancies can be eliminated (unfortunately for those employees) - and in some ways, this is a very bad thing. As monopolies grow, they are able to be more efficient and eliminate jobs. We don't stop and think about the fact that in a massive conglomerate corporation place once stood several competing corporations that meant competition (lower prices, better service to consumers) and more jobs - but of course, less return to investors and less pay to executives.

This is a troubling trend, as the American Dream is snuffed and the middle class finds itself dwindling deeper into poverty, while the richest seem to work tirelessly to increase that gap. I'm no socialist or communist, but it occurred to me the goal of these assholes wasn't to get richer - that's something that happens when you are that rich anyway - it is to make the rest of us poorer.

Take all landscape photos and crop 33% of the space on the left side and 33% on the right side. I see they already do this to widescreen videos taken on smart phones.

I just saved 66% of their bandwidth, and made the images more appealing to hipsters and guidos!

The monetary costs of "fighting piracy" is probably far greater than any actual losses. With international treaties, lobbying, investigation, prosecution, lawsuits, direct enforcement (police raids) as well as countless millions handed over to worthless organizations like the MPAA in this effort, the industry and society in general spends more to fight this phantom menace than is prudent.

Of course, common sense would tell us to stop being dumbasses, but there is an entire industry built around "copyright enforcement" and that scam involves too much money to give up anytime soon.

...is that instead of "saving" you on premiums, it will only be used as an excuse to tack on more to your premiums.

We already see this with credit ratings. Having trouble paying your bills, even though you pay your car insurance on time? Here's a nice 20% price hike to punish you.

This is the way this always works, particularly with an industry that you are legally mandated to do business with.

Once every 56 years?

Too soon?

...and used Microsoft's legal team. They would have gotten the gmail.com and google.com domains and then it would just have been a matter to use Microsoft name servers to commit a DoS attack against gmail's hackers, erm, users.

The Federal judges in Nevada are suckers for a good story, I hear, even if it's blatantly false.

"Right to be forgotten" works great for some already-anonymous person... not so much for CEOs or other 1%ers.

Try finding the damn tech support number at Microsoft... for those who are affected, call this number and ask for "Operator": 800-642-7676

At least voicing our angry concerns, and failing any resolution (that won't really happen, but perhaps we can overload their ticket system), call their legal and corporate affairs office (425-706-7863, in the parent post).

I was directed to the "Pro support team" - if they try and sell me Azure services I am going to freak. That's just outright illegal - hijacking and shutting down a competitor to sell business?!?!? I don't care if that is the unintended effect - it is still incredibly unethical and illegal.

I don't serve anything important... but I usually post images through my local server and upload to imgur "through the web" - it took several retries when I tried to do this a short while ago, and now I know why.

Thanks, Microsoft.... you can't just take over no-ip and then run it through crap servers that can't handle the loads.

The only thing these really need added is an LED to aid head tracking with a web cam.

Yeah, I got a couple of those during my time in. I did a few things to improve productivity and spent a lot of time teaching people how to use PCs (The amazing, Tempest-certified Z-248! Running Enable!). I think I had performed over 200 one-on-one classes in the ~3 years I was at that particular unit.

Tweaked the EDL-based print spooler we ran to get print from Camp Lejeune so we could store more than 65,535 lines of print (hmmmm maybe it was 255 lines)... that made it possible for the "night shift" person to come in @ 5am and still get all the print off and ready by 7am... before, we had to start at 10pm to get the same amount of work done. It seems that both communications and printing were faster if they weren't performed at the same time, by at least an order of magnitude.

I wrote a nice database system to track inventory cards and print out cards that were pretty much identical to the forms our S-4 used back in the late 80s in the Marine Corps. It was much better than the system they had used - which relied on removing old cards, and filling out, by hand, all new cards every time a piece of equipment was checked out or checked in. It helped alot with leakage... and worse, with equipment that was supposedly checked out, but had actually been checked in (and the Marine would then have to incur replacement cost).

There were other things I worked on, but this one had a significant impact on our effectiveness as a logistics unit.

Seriously... who the frack thought this would EVER be practical? It's like that nonsense "beer delivery" drone - except there was no way that drone could deliver a 6-pack, let alone a case of bottled beer to anybody. Range, payload, maintenance, control, and fuel all mean a big "NO" to delivering packages by "drone" for at least the next few decades.

It's a JOKE. Apparently, a brilliant one, because slashdotters still believe that something useful could be delivered in a practical manner this way.