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Comment Re:I can't believe we're afraid of these assholes (Score 1) 542

by Jawnn (#47800755) Attached to: Grand Ayatollah Says High Speed Internet Is "Against Moral Standards"

Actually, it is very difficult to believe atheism would lead to anything, positive or negative. Atheism is the absence of belief...

Captain Pedantic here..., and I am going to stop you right there. Atheism is not the absence of belief. It is the absence of any theistic belief. In a case where "the truth" is pretty much unknowable, that position is itself a belief. While the atheists I know are largely reasonable and intelligent people, an awful lot of them arrogantly refuse to acknowledge that inconvenient fact.

Comment Re:If the Grand Ayatollah's against it.... (Score 2) 542

by Jawnn (#47800675) Attached to: Grand Ayatollah Says High Speed Internet Is "Against Moral Standards"

The pope essentially said the same thing recently when he said that young people spend too much time on the Internet.

Religious leaders know that the survival of religion is being threatened by knowledge sharing on the internet, so it shouldn't be any surprise that they would speak out against it.

Not that I feel any need to defend His Holiness, but there's a bit of a difference, don't you think, between calling the Internet "immoral" and observing that young people might have better things to do with some of their time?

Comment Re:If the Grand Ayatollah's against it.... (Score 3, Insightful) 542

by Jawnn (#47800653) Attached to: Grand Ayatollah Says High Speed Internet Is "Against Moral Standards"

Why don't we ask the atheist communists that imprisoned, tortured, and murdered people for going to church?

You mean like the righteous Christians who have done the same thing to tens of thousands for going to the wrong church? Try not to lead with your chin like that. It takes all the sport out of it.

Comment As if... (Score 1) 542

by Jawnn (#47800591) Attached to: Grand Ayatollah Says High Speed Internet Is "Against Moral Standards"
...we needed any more evidence that religious "leaders" are uniquely unqualified to act as an authority on "morality". My command of Sharia is far from what it could be, but I am damn sure that neither Allah nor The Prophet had anything to say about high-speed Internet connections. Most ISP's however, are probably guilty of at least a few "stoning" offenses, but as for the "morality" a faster Internet, the Ayatollah is full of shit. Ignorance is never a moral virtue.

Comment Re:So you agree with this bill. Cool. (Score 2) 528

by Jawnn (#47766085) Attached to: Limiting the Teaching of the Scientific Process In Ohio
Well, no. I most certainly do not agree with the bill. It is clearly an attempt to hide "the how" behind science facts, placing them on par with (for example) Bible "facts" and then mandating that no one may question either authority (science or the Bible). Fuck that. Scientific "facts" are different because of the method used to bring them to light. Any attempt to remove that method from the comparison is madness.

Comment Re: Yeah, as music artists know, not so fun is it? (Score 1) 275

by Jawnn (#47748087) Attached to: Dropbox Caught Between Warring Giants Amazon and Google
The entire recording industry's business model was built on artificial scarcity. Until viable digital technologies came along, it was complicated and expensive to mass-produce and distribute recorded music. That model is dying, slowly, but dying just the same. There will not be the mountains of money that the record companies (and to some extent, their artists) enjoyed for many decades. Oh, they're fighting tooth-and-nail to hang onto it, but keeping that model propped up through litigation will ultimately fail. As you say, if the music is that fantastic, people will pay to own it, just not as much as almost everyone things they should.

Comment Re:I seem to remember... (Score 0) 275

by Jawnn (#47747785) Attached to: Dropbox Caught Between Warring Giants Amazon and Google
You need to study your history, son. Using a dominant position, as in "I have enough cash to crush you 10 times over in a price war..." to drive out competition is the very essence of anti-competitive behavior. The U.S. chip makers screamed bloody murder when foreign chip makers were "dumping" memory here. The railroads engaged in similar things in the early twentieth century. The energy industry is doing it today. Back to school with you.

Comment Re:I have worked at a few ISPs (Score 1) 251

by Jawnn (#47713947) Attached to: Comcast Training Materials Leaked

This is totally normal for ISPs. up-selling, attempts to retain customers at any cost. At comcast it was pressed on our call center tech support guys fairly hard but moreso on customer service reps in the billing/accounts department. at AT&T there was literally a whole department called "the save team" who got financial incentives to retain customers. if you called to cancel, you would be put on the line with the save team. they could get credit for a save if they could transfer a customer back to technical support "oh, our tech guys can fix that problem for you and your service will be fine, plus i gave you a month credit" (or something to that affect). and then the tech staff would get this transferred call about how their printer didnt work. completely unrelated, and after being bounced around and on hold, then being told "uhhh. we cant help you with that", they got right pissed and demanded to cancel again. the save team rep, already got a notch on their saved belt but the customer still quit. it was a corrupt system right to the core :)

Horseshit! The way to keep me as a customer is to deliver good value for my money. Presumably, that means at least delivering what we agreed upon when I signed up. If I call because you're not delivering that, fucking fix it and then give me my month's credit. I will go away happy. But do not, under any circumstances, try hardball tactics to get me to give you still more money for things that I'm now certain you can't/won't deliver. You will only solidify my opinion that you are a bad bet and that I should buy my service from one of your competitors. Hey! Stop laughing. There might be one...

Comment Re:Access restrictions (Score 1) 89

by Jawnn (#47712653) Attached to: Heartbleed To Blame For Community Health Systems Breach

How does getting onto the VPN equate to accessing the secret stuff? Isn't there another layer of security?

That is a good point. OK, they gained a presence on a sensitive network. How is it that they were able to bang around and breach critical systems on that network with no one noticing? No IDS/IPS that would have detected something like that? Or were the systems so poorly secured that breaching them didn't make enough noise for an IDS to notice?

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