I live in Argentina. I pay Facebook Ads to a company called Facebook Ireland. I'm dealing with a US company (Facebook, Inc.) which provides me a service in Argentina (targeted ads), from the US (where their servers are located), and yet my money goes to Ireland.

I wonder why.

and i think this is the whole point of it. These companies (Facebook, Apple, WhatsApp, Google, etc), all want you to use their dumbed down, one-size-fits-all product. There are no options to customize anything. Everything else is not available to the user, or is hidden. Firefox is also jumping in on this idea that people don't want any buttons, and that you should just remove everything from the UI. Now you can't even turn off JS from the GUI without a plugin (sorry, an add-on).

So, facebook comes in boring blue. All images are the same size. all text is the same color. You get out of your 9-to-5 work at a cubicle and go into your facebook cubicle.

But the thing is: a lot of people want to customize things. Guys just loooove slick blue-on-black. Girls love iOS omg white with cute handwritten font. But no. These companies don't let you take that decision. It's not up to you. Do people suck at "theming" their computers? GOD YES, "menu bar" background images are just horrible. but some people like it. Even if it's horrible, it looks good to them, and guess what? Just let it be. Let the user be able to skin their stuff. Why go all soviet on them?

So people find ways to do this with "alternative" apps that do more harm than good (like those facebook "plugins" that let you add emoticons and shit - guess what! Facebook had to incorporate that. )

And yes. I remember MySpace. I remember what a pain it was. how truly AWFUL those profiles looked like. Completely unreadable, just garbage. But that's how the owner of the profile liked it. So, let it be. What's next? Municipalities telling people what color they should paint their house? (oh yes, that already exists in some "communities" in the US)

He used an euphemism, and he's right. You're being a pedantic idiot. peering, management, power and data centers are STILL THERE. It doesn't cost more money to transfer more data. Capital costs and operational costs are THE SAME wether you transfer 400 terabytes or 400 megabytes. In the end there's just consumers paying a monthly fee for a service wether they use it or not.
And you want to serve those clients for PEAK demand. Just like you do with power.
That kid downloading torrents really is just a drop in the ocean compared to the thousands of people NOT torrenting but still paying for their service.

CTO/CIO IS a political position. CTO sits at the table with the CEO and the board. Do you think a scruffy bearded neck with a hawaiian shirt and flip flops has ANY chance of doing that?

I have Programming Perl. Bought 15 years ago, and I used to consult it a lot.

Now I just google the information. Easier to find than on the book...

Books are nice and have a romantic feeling about them. But e-docs are oh god so much more convenient.

This.
Where I live, both 13.2KV and 220V wires used to hang from the same posts. 13.2KV ones much higher. During a storm with heavy winds, I used to see them swing and arc and boom - power was out. Until the storm ended and then they restored power.

In the 90s they did a massive rebuilding of the distribution grid. All 13.2KV lines were buried and all 220V "naked" wire was replaced with insulated, quadruple, "twisted" cable hanging mostly from house fronts (mostly city houses one right next to another).

This eliminated almost all of the storm problems. No more wind or lightning knocking down power. Sometimes yes, you hear a very loud thunder and power goes out but that's most likely the product of a direct or very nearby hit that makes protections trip.

Unfortunately now we have other problems. Growing pains. Too many new apartment buildings taking a lot of juice and the grid isn't being upgraded. On very hot days power goes out and you have all sorts of brownouts and blackouts. This is sheer corruption: every apartment building, over a certain number of houses, is supposed to have its own 13.2KV->220V transformer but they just pay some power company officials (yes, state-owned company) and they hook em up to 220V. Suddenly you have 60 new houses sucking juice from the already loaded transformer...

You don't talk to kids, do you?

Remember when ALL YOU WANTED was your own computer?
Kids are over that.
They're also over the ALL I WANT IS A LAPTOP
and ALL I WANT IS A NETBOOK

Now, all they want is a tablet. Kids don't want PCs anymore. It's unbelievable.

And even worse: many don't even want a tablet. they want just a smartphone.

Objection! Speculative.

just FYI: I've had MCP2200 stop working for whatever reason. One day, boom, bye bye MCP. No idea why.
Also you have to manually install drivers for them, which may or may not be something important to you.

i'm pretty sure it refers to IBM's inability to deliver enough chips (powerPC), which caused problems for Sony, and was the reason Apple moved to Intel.

No, it's because if they release a firmware that just refuses to work, the people that made these fakes will just release hacked drivers, based on FTDI's.
FTDI wants to destroy your hardware so you, as a consumer, will go to the manufacturer of your device. This will eventually teach them to follow the "pedigree" of their chips, and buy them from reputable sources. And not from "the cheapest seller in china".

Huh? This is criminal? But "impersonating" a chip isn't?

I'm pretty sure DMCA or friends WON'T let you, legally, make a chip that pretends to be another chip. Especially if it's not marked "compatible" but it's just a plain FAKE.

So some company makes a fake Ford, which has acceleration problems. It crashes, kills someone, and Ford is to blame because it had a Ford badge? ...

Carrefour does this in Argentina. People don't really understand the concept but they're starting to get used to it. Most banks have been doing it for a long time as well.

"Hyper-efficient" McDonald's and Walmart? Nope.

I find this interesting. I'm in Argentina, and my cable HD is better than TV 720p rips. It looks just incredible.

I guess maybe it's because we only get about 30 HD channels and the remaining 120 are SD.

seriously? gmail as disposable address? Haven't you heard of Mailinator? or bugmenot?