In 17 years the number of complaints went up by 30%. However according to the Census Bureau, the number of "Mathematical and Computer Science" workers increased by 150% between 1997 and 2012 (from 1.3 Million to 3.3 Million). The number of job postings likely scaled similarly, so the complaints per posting actually went down.

Source:
http://www.census.gov/prod/3/9...
http://www.census.gov/compendi...

Except the whole part about inviting speakers who are actively trying to suppress free speech by banning the Quran.

So, there was no billing error here. The guy actually had his modem making long-distance calls for inordinate amounts of time. Doesn't seem like an AT&T error. Though it definitely sucks for the old man/woman!

No billing error? The entire billing system sucks balls at the largest possible frame.

There should be a legislative directive that all such usage-based billing plans provide an option for the end user to set hard spending caps, which are automatically enforced by the service provider.

Show me a corporation that doesn't—at least attempt—to enact hard spending caps enforced by automatic systems wherever and whenever possible. Heads roll in the gutters when a corporation loses $100 million because some trading desk manages to go rogue with respect to set trading limits. (By the Finnish system of traffic fines, a $100 million loss for AT&T is about on par with some old geezer tabbed for $25,000.)

End users are, of course, purposefully disadvantaged to have to police their own usage by manual vigilance, because everyone knows this is a lucrative fail mode for AT&T's revenue piracy service.

That this whole thing sucks balls right down to the bag root is the least possible diagnosis.

Canonical earned their black eye in spades by giving no advance guidance to their dual-head power users while knowingly ruining the dual head experience in the service of a reconceived user interface which might or might not be all for the best in the long run.

It was their blasted refusal to honestly inform their dual head power users that the dual head power user experience would be unavailable in Ubuntu for several releases so that we could plan accordingly that caused me to set the Canonical bit in my bozo register.

Now, George was a good straight boy to begin with,
but there was bad blood in him someway
he got into the magic bullets and
that leads straight to Devil's work
just like marywanna leads to heroin
You think you can take them bullets and leave 'em, do you?
Just save a few for your bad days.
well...

Well, now we all have those bad days when we can't hit for shit.

The more of them magics you use,
the more bad days you have without them
So it comes down to finally
all your days being bad without the bullets
It's magics or nothing.
Time to stop chippying around and kidding yourself,
kid, you're hooked, heavy as lead

And that's where old George found himself.
Out there at the crossroads.
molding the Devil's bullets.
Now a man figures it's his bullets,
so it'll hit what he wants to hit.
But it don't always work out that way

You see, some bullets is special for a single aim.
A certain stag, or a certain person
And no matter where you aim, that's where the bullet will end up.
And in the moment of aiming, the gun turns into a dowser's wand,
and point where the bullet wants to go

I guess old George didn't rightly know what he was getting himself into,
the fit was on him and it carried him right to the crossroads.

- Tom Waits, The Black Rider

This is the most substantive bit I was able to find, a forum post by David Jian Wu from eariler today:

Thanks for the questions!

I can't even find a discussion of the winning games by someone who knows the game and its strategic evolution.

Interesting, but at present there's nothing much to discuss here.

I can't speak for the Americas, but in Ireland, the UK and China the general practise is not to bother bringing the parcels out, but instead to just bring the (lying) notes and leave those in the box/doorframe if there is no answer. Or more often, without even knocking.

Put a hungry bear behind him. I bet he could hit 30km/h.

Says a simpering herniologist.

I guess you've never stopped to ask your where all those limping gazelles the lions actually catch come from originally.

Sure, I can prop up a two tonne beam with my kneecap, once.

This is the same old elitist bullshit being smuggled out through the back door.

Fundamentally, there are a lot of people out there who don't want Wikipedia to be part of the answer. Whatever standard Wikipedia achieves, the bar is raised at least a hook higher.

I was brought up with "Gerry Germ". This is how insanity was introduced into my grade three class back in the 1970s.

Some of my unfortunate classmates probably grew up to become the adults who try to spray the entire world with 99.9% germicidal carcinogens. Aside from the shocking innumeracy (readily vaccinated in just five inquisitive minutes wielding your dad's miraculous eight-digit calculator, during which one discovers the small difference between zero point zero repeating and 0.001 as multiplicands), there are about six other layers of illiteracy here. We have subsequently learned that our own bodies are outnumbered 10 to 1 (if you count cells) or 100 to 1 (if you count genes) by our personal Gerry Germ symbiotes.

Nevertheless, we continue to hold wacky beliefs about our standards of personal hygiene, and absolutely ludicrous beliefs about what we ingest or acquire from the external environment. Yet somehow we live.

The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of information we encounter in daily living has never been up to to the germ-free standards of my grade three Gerry Germ indoctrination.

Common sense is the human ability to walk past something yummy that's being lying on the sidewalk for an hour that you just stepping on, and not licking it off the bottom of your shoe.

Yet with information about the world, the idea is that the ignorant and uniformed are just going to stick any piece of information into their mouth that they pass by, so all information in the world needs to be currated by food-safety professionals (aka all the authors dripping with expertise and credentials who might have succeeded in authoring Nupedia before the heat-death of the local universe).

Fundamentally the reason that this cloaked nonsense in Wikipedia is lying there undetected is that it's almost entirely immaterial. If a person holds a transient belief in the Australian god Poopoocaca, how much does that affect this year's RRSP contribution level? About 0.00000001 times as much as the five minutes with dad's expensive 8-digit calculator they unfortunately bypassed as a young child.

And you know what? The lunacies these people believe make 99.9% of the content on Wikipedia look like an oasis of sanity by comparison.

Wikipedia needs to bump that up to 99.99% exactly as badly as the germicidal soap in my bathroom needs to bump itself up to a 99.99% bacterial kill rate. As if the human condition is nothing but 1000 lb sand-dampened power supplies with a -100 dB bullshit noise floor at 60 Hz.

Now if I can just find an industrial-strength soap (so far recognized as safe) to rid me tout sweet of all the preening assholes from which this elitist crap originates in the first place, I might start clicking the "buy" button.

My CenturyLink DSL connection starts out slightly faster than the advertized rate, but if do any sort of sustained high bandwidth activity, it slowly gets worse and worse. So anytime I watch something on Netflix it starts out at the highest quality, and then every 5-10 minutes stops to rebuffer at a lower quality, until it hits 0.7 Mbps. This occurs regardless of whether I am watching during peak hours or not, and I've seen it with long FTP downloads as well so it is not specific to Netflix, or caused by congestion.

I haven't been able to track down whether it is caused by ISP throttling, or if my wireless router / DSL modem has issues with sustained use. I've tried doing speed tests before, during, and after the problem occurs and they always show that my connection has the full advertized speed.

If they want to revoke his grandmaster status as the original poster suggested, they ought to have some proof that he cheated in those tournaments, not just this recent one in Dubai. Otherwise a ban on future play and footnote on his grandmaster status is more appropriate.

Key fragments? Can we have that with a bow tie and a nice NIST endorsement?

When you break your word, you break something that can not be mended.

Even if you wear the regal black cloak of the Central Malfeasance Agency, when you're found out, it can and will be held against you.

Ho hum. This is clipper chip redux.

In 1997, a group of leading cryptographers published a paper, "The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption," analyzing the architectural vulnerabilities of implementing key escrow systems in general, including but not limited to the Clipper Chip Skipjack protocol. The technical flaws described in this paper were instrumental in the demise of the Clipper chip as a public policy option.
...
The U.S. government continued to press for key escrow by offering incentives to manufacturers, allowing more relaxed export controls if key escrow were part of cryptographic software that was exported.

Cooperation requires either trust or truncheons. No worries for the NSA. It'll soon enough be classified as a state-secret crime against humanity to bleat when beaten, if it isn't already.

Yeah it is really crappy that a company can lie to the credit agencies about you, destroying your credit score and there is nothing you can do about it. I mean, you can file to have the information in your credit report corrected (because those are statements of facts which would constitute libel), but they aren't required to stop including that information in your credit score (because the score is a statement of opinion) and they usually don't.

The layout of paths will seem right and comfortable only when it is compatible with the process of walking. And the process of walking is far more subtle than one might imagine.

More at 120 Paths and Goals.

This is basically the famous "make the buildings first, then add the paths later" meme, as told by the architect Christopher Alexander.

A human language must comfortably accommodate the natural cognitive arcs of the human thought process. Ideally, it should fit habits of thought as comfortably as a hand fits a well oiled leather baseball glove, one that your forefather gave to his son (or your foremother gave to her daughter), stretching in an unbroken chain all the way back to human prehistory.

What we need, then, is a good proto conlang that we can throw into a cultural stew pot to steep for a thousand years, accommodating to the human mind however it will. If by then it still seems rough, throw it back into the pot for another thousand years.

The figure of merit, therefore, for a proto conlang is that it accommodates its future evolution gracefully, blooming like a rose quite unexpectedly, making everyone blush (2000 years from now) over how we ever got along without it.

Instead, what most people busy themselves inventing is a proto conlang bowling shoe, a neat (but sweaty) communal object which fits anyone who happens to drop by to drop some pins, with no possibly confusion about which foot goes into which shoe, or how the lacing pattern goes if one the laces should happen to break—pouring over in their righteous zeal the following menu (among others) to divine the one true ineluctable escape from all things arbitrary:

43 Different Ways To Lace Shoes

What English already does: Riding Boot Lacing

This method is for riding boots (motorbike or equestrian) whose sides are joined at the top and loosen near the ankle. The laces zig-zag from both ends and are tied in the middle.

English knows from feet on the ground where the pressure goes.

What weedy conlingers tend to moot: Hidden Knot Lacing

By hiding the knot underneath, the result is an uninterrupted series of straight "bars" that looks particularly distinctive on dress shoes or sneakers alike.

Conglingers know from eyes in the face that irregular knots and loose ends of human cognition are better spoked than spoken.