17731604
submission
Dr_Ish writes:
Lafayette, Louisiana is a smallish town (*circa* 160.000) that has a publicly own utility system. In the last couple of years, the utility system has rolled out a fiber to the home system, that has massively annoyed the previous monopoly, Cox. After many court cases and resulting troubles, the system is up and running. However, today it was tested to the max, when half the city lost power for a short time. Even though the power was out. the LUS Fiber system remained up and running. When even TV stations were briefly off-line, the system survived. In an area that is prone to natural disasters like hurricanes, this was a remarkable feat. So, the question here is, how many of you can still connect to your ISP, when all the power is down? Is this really something unusual and noteworthy, or much less than that?
14489046
submission
Dr_Ish writes:
Over the last couple of day I have been in e-mail communication with a senior person at BP (The Director of Brand Communications). I have been trying to persuade her that the commercials they are running on the Gulf coast are a waste of money. When I have been out in public places and the commercials run, people tend to say, or shout nasty things (not suitable for here — although I'm sure you can imagine). Similar things happen in private houses too. Apparently, BP think that their commercials are 'useful information for the public'. They seem to think that they have market research to support this view. My suggestion to them is that the money could be much better spent doing more useful things. I would really appreciate input from people who are afflicted by the BP commercials. Do you think that they do any good, are you persuaded? Do you think that the money could be used better elsewhere? Thank in advance.
10364414
submission
Dr_Ish writes:
A few days ago, I got a sales call from someone attempting to sign me up for AT and T DSL service (I have long distance service with AT and T). I politely told the person to go to hell, as I have much higher speed and cheaper on-line access through my local utility company. This afternoon, a UPS truck pulled up at the house with a package — a new DSL modem from AT and T! When I called, AT and T claimed that the order had been placed by an external contractor, but they could not identify who. They said they would send me a mailing label, but if they did not get their modem back, then I would be charged for it. To me, this appears to be a blatant case of DSL slamming. Has anyone else had a similar experience?
594638
submission
Dr_Ish writes:
I run a large mailing list for professional philosophers, called PHILOSOP. The list has been around a long time and is quite large. Most posts to the list are mundane notices about conferences and the like. Recently though a message was distributed inviting subscribers to become a 'friend' of one of the list subscribers. This message clearly violated the mailing list terms of use. As a general rule, the mailing list has some quite robust anti-spam measures in place. This one managed to circumvent them all. However, a little investigation showed that the message had not been sent by the user themselves. It seems that the social networking site Yaari.com has come up with a novel way of attracting new users. When someone subscribes to the site from a Gmail, or a Yahoo e-mail account (there may be others too), the user is prompted for their password on those systems and cannot register without providing it. The terms of use of Yaari, which the user has to agree to, gives the site permission to send out invitations to everyone in the users address book. This naturally includes mailing lists like PHILOSOP. Although this issue is clearly mentioned on the registration page, it seems that not all users actually read the warnings (there is a surprise!) There was a little coverage of this issue last year, most notably at Pulse2 and the Profy.com blog. The Yaari.com site has now been added to our blacklist. May I politely suggest that others do likewise?
