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Comment Re:get off my lawn (Score 1) 247

Charging for caller ID on landlines is a scam (like pretty much everything about telecommunications billing), but I've never seen cell phone service without caller ID.

I'm guessing you're not old enough to have ever had analog cell-phone service. I don't recall if caller ID was even offered as an add-on service, but I know I didn't have it with my phone and my service. Vibrating call alert and an 8-character dot-matrix alphanumeric LED readout (so you could attach names to the phone numbers stored in memory!) were expensive enough.

Comment Re:Wait, what PII? (Score 1) 204

Yes and no. In a practical sense you're right and I said as much in the second paragraph. As for the legal definition of PII:

NIST Special Publication 800-122 defines PII as "any information about an individual maintained by an agency, including (1) any information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual‘s identity, such as name, social security number, date and place of birth, mother‘s maiden name, or biometric records; and (2) any other information that is linked or linkable to an individual, such as medical, educational, financial, and employment information."

Part 2 is pretty much met given the data that's being sent to doubleclick. But Part 1 isn't being met. This is an AND statement, so for this to be PII, both parts have to be true.

Comment Re:Paradox (Score 2) 200

It gives the impression that a high-paying job is relatively easy to get, and that's just not true.

My FIL hired developers out of the local community college for his business. AFAIK they were paid well enough (this was upstate NY) and they were using COBOL, but they did a good job and his business grew. Not every coding position means you'll get $90,000 and options.

But your larger point is still true. Maybe he should have said 'higher paying', but it's all relative.

Comment Wait, what PII? (Score 2) 204

The example that the EFF gave listed general information about a person, but there's nothing that would directly identify the person. No SSN, no address, no name.

Yes, doubleclick and others could use that with other information they already have and determine with some probability who the person is. But that's a separate discussion on expanding what PII is or limiting what kind of data can be stored about a person, either of which I'd be in favor of.

Comment Re:Paradox (Score 5, Insightful) 200

Community college gives a few things:

1) a stepping stone to a college they might not have been able to get in before
2) a way of getting two low-cost years, then move to a better school and only pay for two more expensive years
3) two more years of education

We have an awesome tech school near my house. Nobody thinks that the graduates are going to become astronauts and doctors, but not everyone has to be a doctor or astronaut. We still need plumbers/electricians/carpenters/mechanics/welders in this country and those kinds of jobs should pay well enough to put a family in the middle class.

Comment Re:Not to mention Audio Editing (Score 1) 223

I got CE for like $30 or $40 back in the day/ Even accounting for inflation, AA is WAY MORE EXPENSIVE. Even after the purchase by Adobe, I think the cost to existing CE users was in the hundreds of dollars. They may have added cool things for power users but for casual users I'd rather wrestle with Audacity.

Comment Stop, just stop (Score 4, Insightful) 75

Quit making these dumbass comparisons between everyday products and something scientific unless there's really something to be concerned about. Crap like this leads to people like Foodbabe telling us that the same ingredients in water are also used to degrade iron. It's true, but the fact it's true doesn't mean that water will cause us to rust.

Comment Re: a better question (Score 1) 592

...and Linux has software to play blu-ray discs?

Yes. Technically, MakeMKV is a ripper, not a player, but once you have a disc ripped, you can play the ripped file with the player of your choice: VLC, mplayer, etc. You can also stream it over your network, transcode it to take less space, etc.

Comment Not going after you (Score 5, Insightful) 105

If you don't know who those people are (and I'll admit I don't) then this isn't for you. It's about getting younger people involved and voting. Older people already vote more regularly, with people in their teens and 20s not voting with much regularity (see 2014). If Obama can reach those voters and get them interested in the process, then he's laying a base for Democrats going forward.

As for the 'all other problems being solved' nonsense, take a look at the schedule for Congress over the past few years and see what tough issues they spent their time working on.

Comment Re:ATI/AMD has had shitty drivers for 20 years (Score 1) 160

AMD was the only company directly competing with Intel on the desktop/server markets. NVidia and ARM were embedded or other and thus didn't compete directly. Remember that the only reason we're still using x86 hardware instead of Itanium is because AMD bolted 64-bit on and it became a hit. Enough so that Intel uses it now.

AMD likely has (well had) cash from all the other things they did, just like other chipmakers.

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