ArsTechnica covered this "epidemic" in March.

The article is slightly sensationalist, but interesting ... The Remote Administration Tool is the revolver of the Internet's Wild West.

Perhaps law enforcement has opened a can of worms... or monkeys... autistic monkeys.

Obama has been targetting smokers since the beginning. He is an "ex"-smoker, you see so everyone should quit.

When I moved to the states a few years back now, I smoked Djarum. Two months before I moved, Obama + Phillip Morris (Marlboro I believe) Lobbied to ban "flavoured" cigarettes, well except for menthol. The legislation isn't supposed to make sense, it's just supposed to make money.

Phillip Morris with Obama's assistance got all flavoured cigarettes banned in the states. Then Phillip Morris after basically killing the market for many companies in the states (Clove cigarettes, etc) began selling "clove" Marlboro's to indonesia and other Indo-European countries.

Not that Canada is all that much better, they tax cigarettes about 200%. But at least you can still buy them if you feel like it.


Now if you've seen Djarum or other "flavoured" brands in the last 3+ years. They got around the ban by renaming them "Cigarello's" using cigar paper (thicker) and increasing the diameter by about an 1/8 of an inch or so.

Hah! I thought it was Liv Tyler in the T-Mobile commercials.

The interesting thing with Windows --- change under the hood (non-forward facing core changes) has almost always been improvements; minus the f-up in Vista with file-copy priority scheduling. Whereas forward facing (GUI/interface) has mostly been superfluous. E.g. it looks different but functions about the same or better.

Microsoft threw that idea out with Windows 8: core changes were good, but the forward facing GUI/Interface was a drastic change that looks different and functions about the same or WORSE. It's likely this started to creep in with Vista onwards, along with the Ribbon-mentality.

The other problem(s) are most noticeable when you do a jump like I did, from Win2000 to Win7, Office2000 to Office2013, etc. Compared to a "normal" customizable toolbar, Ribbons are less flexible, take up more real-estate and usually require more clicks to get the same task accomplished than before.

Where things haven't really changed, it's business as usual --- yet where it has changed, it's almost always worse. Every time I need to uninstall a program my brain does a disconnect trying to locate the "Uninstall" button in "Programs and Features" ... not a button anymore just a piece of unadorned text above the 'file-list'. Same thing with NewFolder in Explorer or the Open/Save dialog.

The tax rate in Canada and the US is fairly similiar, even for lower salaries (slightly above minimum wage), it's near 20-30%. Middle-Class hovers in the 33% bracket (give or take a few %), and when you start to get into upper-class ranges your tax rate decreases. Income tax in North America (dunno about mexico) is heavily weighted against those that make the least.

Coke/New Coke was planned. Coca Cola flooded the market with New Coke, after less than a year they brought "Coca-Cola Classic" back --- except in America it wasn't Coca Cola Classic ... it was Coca Cola Classic with HFCS instead of sugar. Unlike Canada and Mexico and probably everywhere else in the world where Coke is actually made with sugar.

All CMS's will come "highly-recommended" from someone.

The most interesting CMS's I've seen are Concrete5 and ProcessWire.

The biggest pain-in-the-ass has been Joomla --- funny that it's one of the most popular of the bunch.

While there is a lot to bitch about IE over the years, a lot of the workarounds that you see floating around the web can be made redundant and unnecessary by using "Strict" html which prevents IE from rendering into compatibility mode.

Also it's quite interesting to see where the HTML spec has headed with the display property --- see inline-flex, flex, and flex-box.

One thing MS actually got right - and should of been the standard from the beginning is:

Padding & Margins were included in an elements size (width and height).

It is a complete pain in the ass trying to position elements in HTML when something like this:

[div style="width:600px;margin:10px 10px; padding:5px 5px;"]

is actually 630px wide...and to get an actual 600px width (total) you need to make the div be 570px since the element does NOT include layout spacing in the height/width settings. That aspect of HTML is nothing short of ass-backwards.

Really, because when Mozilla/Netscape was available in 1999/2000 it was a 25MB download, which took a damnable long time over a dialup connection. Compare that to Opera 5/6, a 3.5-5MB download that also included an email client, tabs, customizable interface, low memory footprint, etcetera etcetera.

There are a handful of breeds, known as "Primitive" dogs, which are noted primarily because their breed has remained relatively pure (not interbred/interference from humans) and they have similiar builds and traits.
Primitive Dogs

Primitive or aboriginal dogs are canids that have kept close to the original form and have evolved with little or no purposeful human intervention. They spread throughout the world with the first colonizers but preserved a loose association with man.

Primitive dogs in all countries have a very similar, typical morphology known as the "long-term pariah morphotype" (LTPM) or primal body design from which most other dog forms are derived: a wolf or fox-like appearance with wedge-shaped head and a pointed muzzle, almond eyes, erect ears, for optimal sound retrieval and possibly body temperature regulation, and a long, curved tail.
More

We found out about this interesting subset recently, when we found out that our "mongrel" puppy was actually a Canaan breed.

Considering Opera has these default settings in Opera:Config

Persistent Storage
Domain Quota Exceed Handling For localStorage: 1 (Open a dialog when the quota for local storage is exceeded)
Domain Quota For localStorage: 5120
Global Quota For localStorage: 102400
User JS Storage Quota: 0 (Quota in kilobytes available for user script storage. Set to 0 to prevent any use.)

Yeah I'd say it's not vulnerable to a harddrive filling exploit.

Opera definitely has issues with site-compatibility - usually due to browser sniffing, than actual standards that aren't implemented.
But it is far and above most of it's kin as far as security is concerned.

They can't get my LastPass password, unless they have physical access to my machine AND me - as I don't know what it is. As my LastPass password requires a token-string combined with a keyboard-shortcut that includes CTRL that then generates the password on the fly, which is something like: 59`äh12©íJ26846÷á2ásÓj3’¦0
--- of course slashdot is removing some of the high-ansi chars I just pasted.

Where are these rules? :-) One of my favorite Risk games was Risk II on the PC.

Basic Risk rules are flawed for sure, even if all you consider is the value of retaining certain "continents" per round.

Most of the browser extensions work pretty much the same or exactly the same -- there have been very few exceptions to this (or possibly only one). Extensions would be much easier to deal with - especially when the browsers have produced the same implementation prior to it becoming the spec if we could just use "--new-feature", and if there was an alternate/differing implementation by ms, opera, webkit, or mozilla then a specific extension could override the generic --new-feature as -o-new-feature or -moz-new-feature, etc.

As is, attempting to implement pre-spec features makes the css a complete mess, e.g. 4 rounded corner borders could require up to 16 lines of css.

Yeah, unlike every other Foam/Rubber tip replacement that work with almost all earbuds out there this is for Decibullzshit headphones only. I'll stick with the foam tips ($15) that I picked up at Radio-Shack; still have 4 sets - they wear over time, but a single pair (pkg of 5) lasted a year or more.

Also appears to be primarily apple-only, as the "remote" is for the iphone. Awesome way to kill sales.