Its root cause is "Because Oracle, Larry Ellison is the Antichrist", a point of view that I am not exactly unsympathetic with. Libre Office was forked from the "Before engulfed by Oracle" open-source code, and many of the OO developers jumped ship for LibreOffice.

So, Oracle ended up donating Open Office to the Apache Foundation, but the fork had already happened. Rationally, the two should merge, but The Great Schism is a done deal, there's competing hair-splitting in the various forms of free-as-in-speech licenses, and never the twain shall meet.

*sigh*

My suspicion -- this is because any characteristic that's controlled by a gene on an X chromosome, women have two, men have only one. So, women will have some tendency to "regress to the mean" for anything with co-dominance between the two copies.

My opinion has always been treat everyone fairly and equally, and I don't care where the percentages of $group end up. Today, though, it's for every single group anyone can assert exists in some percentage in the population, every field of endeavor whatsoever must have precisely that percentage represented in it.

Yeah, that's what ESPN is apparently suing Verizon for. Comcast, if you want the most basic of basic cable, you have to pay ESPN a few bucks a month for the privilege.

I use the "Safeway Kitchens" store brand in my coffee at work. There's a bottle of some organonaturaopathicholistical type stuff I got on sale at Whole Pay^H^H^H Foods a while back that's also pretty good; that's what I'm using at home at the moment. If it's still on sale when I run out, I might get some more of it, or the Safeway store brand if it's cheaper per use.

I wonder if reaction to stevia is genetically based, like the whole cilantro thing.

Am I the only one who thought of that scene from Roger Rabbit?

I've done that -- I don't watch them, and they aren't on my favorites list. Still, I am personally offended that several dollars per month of my cable bill goes to them. Removing that offense is worth some (smallish) amount of money to me.

Saccharine has this horrible nasty bitter taste to me. Aspartame is better, but still not great. The Diet Mountain Dew that I drink mass quantities of has acesulfame and sucralose in it, and it tastes ... not too bad. I've gotten used to it, anyway.

Stevia is, to me, the best tasting of the non-calorie sweeteners, and I use it in my coffee, and in my homemade grape soda. (Sodastream CO2 water, a few ounces of grape juice, and stevia.) I'm not sure why it hasn't caught on as a sweetener for sodas. Does it break down in the can like aspartame does? (Over-the-hill aspartame sweetened sodas are unspeakably nasty.)

I would gladly pay more for a bundle that did not include ESPN, or any of the other "sports" networks, or Empty-V or any of its myriad clones. Or the shopping channels.

Heh... yeah... One job, there were layoffs coming, and I had found employment elsewhere. When I handed my boss my notice, he handed it back and said "I never saw that. You're on the layoff list. You'd rather be laid off."

I'm in the US. I've been laid off a few times, not counting that one. One was "Here's a box, pack up your stuff and go", but no security escorting me anywhere. One was "You're going to be laid off three months from now, help get your tasks transferred to the people in the group who are staying." (They were getting rid of all Unix mail servers and transferring it all to MS Exchange, and I was the Unix mail guy, so...) The other was a ... really impressive severance package, if I signed the "I promise not to sue for age discrimination" letter. Oh, yeah, sure, no problem... there was an offer from another company, doing pretty much the same thing, in my personal email account before I got home. No guards or anything there, either, just come by the office and get my stuff whenever, I was "officially still employed" there for a couple of weeks, again getting appropriate knowledge transfer done. They did cut off my access to the network.

It's just business. Handle this stuff professionally, because you are a professional.

Even though I disagree with him on a lot of things.

I just wish they'd drop the comedians, though. Unless it's Chuck Nice. Leighann Lord is OK too, but dang, that Eugene Merman dood he has on his radio program far to often, he drops the IQ of the show about 20 points every time he's on. The others make jokes that show they're listening to Tyson and understanding him, but Merman just pops off inane non sequiturs that have nothing to do with the topic.

And don't bring in Bill Nye for guest hosting... Now that's annoying.

I suspect most of the people who are most concerned about net neutrality are going to live to deeply, deeply regret the Internet being put under an almost 100 year old Communications Act.

Most don't... but that's one more thing that might cause the mark to notice that something isn't right. These aren't blasted-by-the-billions spams. These are carefully researched hand-crafted, targeted attacks. As much time as they're putting into it otherwise, a freebee domain at VistaPrint or something is a trivial bit of insurance.

(Note ... this scam depends on two-way communication. When I did that telnet to prove to a friend that email was unauthenticated, if he'd replied, it would not have come to me.)

And I've sent email From: Hillary <root@whitehouse.gov>. Yes, by telnetting to port 25. What the crooks get with typosquatting is that the actual To address of the reply looks very much like the To address they expect -- they don't notice that CEO@cornpany.com isn't the CEO@company.com they expect, where they might twig to the scam if it was CEO239874@hotmail.com.

I've investigated a half dozen or so of these. It has been going on for a while; the first one I saw was about a year ago.

Some of the common characteristics:

They know the names, email addresses, and nicknames of the CEO, and the Treasurer and/or Controller.

They address the Controller by name, a little bit of social pleasantries, and often say what account the "expenditure" should be coded to. The first contact is pleasant, but says it's urgent, and needs to be done right away. Subsequent emails get progresively more demanding.

Early ones asked for the wire transfer to go to a bank in Shanghai, Singapore, or something. More recent ones are transfers to an indivdual's account in a U.S. bank. (Doubtless belonging to some poor gullible person who answered one of those "Well Paid Part Time Job Working From Home as a Financial Agent" spams.)

Registering a .co domain to spoof a .com is popular, as are various other typosquatting tricks. Some cheapskate crooks just use a hotmail-type Reply-To, though.

If the victim sends the money, another request will follow. Then another, and another, as long as they'll keep doing it.

From last September: http://blog.barracuda.com/2014...