What an astounding surprise that voting machines malfunction so frequently.

That's totally not what I would expect from the US government.

Notice that widescreen monitors became popular right about the time televisions and monitors started being advertised by their diagonal dimension.

By that measure if you have a monitor that is 1 inch tall and 50 inches wide you would have a 50-inch monitor.

I don't know why it's 2014 and error messages still don't just tell you what the actual problem is.

Why not have the error say:

"The application that displays the navigation bar stopped because of an error it couldn't recover from. I will now restart it. [OK]"

Because restarting it is the only action that could possibly be taken.

It doesn't make sense to tell the user that "system UI has stopped." The user doesn't care that "system UI has stopped." The user wants to know what the problem it is and have the only logical action taken for them.

Saying that "system UI has stopped" and waiting for the user to perform some action breaks one of the fundamental principles of software design: Never make the user do something the software can do for them.

You don't see many IT professionals hanging out in front of the Home Depot.

I'm just saying.

A single closed-source executable from a German organization claiming to have the support of Amnesty International.

Seems legit.

Just because you can't discern the difference between light and matter in this state -- this does not mean they are the same thing.

Hi there, reality check here.

This is how petroleum prices are managed:

When the oil and gas industry wants fuel prices to be low they optimize the fuel supply chain and keep petroleum flowing so the supply meets demand.

When they want fuel prices to go up, they burden the supply chain to increase demand. One of their favorite tricks is to pilot their fuel container ships to about 20 miles off the coast of port and park them there, waiting for fuel prices to go up.

Fuel prices are managed much like department store sales.

Department stores gradually increase the price of popular items until customers stop buying, then they have a "sale" where they reduce the price of those items to the normal retail price.

Then they start to gradually drive up the prices again.

The petroleum industry does something similar; gradually drives prices up until consumers start to look into alternative fuel measures by stifling the supply of petroleum. Then when that point is reached they have a "sale" where they optimize the supply chain.

Your average consumer sees this as a modern miracle instead of researching to find out why the price went down, and they celebrate by driving, flying and using power sports vehicles more than ever.

Every time the supply chain is stifled the lowest price for petroleum notches upward a little bit to prevent customers from dumping petroleum but raise the overall price at the same time.

Former technical support rep for an email marketing company, here.

You only need DKIM if you send a massive amount of mail to users at Yahoo or Microsoft (outlook.com, hotmail) domains.

The purpose of DKIM is to verify the mail you're sending is actually coming from your domain and not someone who is spoofing your domain.

Nobody cares about DMARK.

Yahoo and Microsoft throttle email based on whether or not your domain has proper DKIM keys setup.

If you don't have them set up you can only spam about a thousand messages before you get blocked.

However if you set up DKIM you can spam Yahoo and Microsoft mail (hotmail, outlook.com, etc) users all day long and those mail providers will turn a blind eye.

That's quite a loaded statement.

Business buggery is not the only reason you might not get the advertised speed.

First of all, ISPs advertise "up to" a specific speed, which means that's the maximum bandwidth you're allowed.

It doesn't state or imply that you'll receive that speed consistently.

It means that, assuming the network is capable of that speed, if you were capable of getting higher speeds you'd be capped at that speed.

I would have thought this would be the elephant in the room, but maybe I'm the only one missing it:

Company takes in a five million dollar funding round.

Company promises to never make a profit.

How are they going to pay back the funding?

What exactly is the company that paid the money "investing" in if the recipient company never plans to get money from their "customers"?

People not only expect to have ice, but are complaining that the lines are too long... ...In the middle of the desert.

The lines are too long. For ice. In the middle of the desert.

What the actual fucking fuck.

In a perfect world that would be exactly what the data would be used for.

I worked in tech support for many years and I can tell you that one of two things happens with this diagnostic data:

1. It's aggregated and used for analysis to identify priority problems based on keywords. This almost never happens even when companies say they are doing it. In fact, most of the bugs (even at Microsoft) are cherry picked by programmers who work on whatever bug they feel like in whatever order seems best to them unless it's a priority zero bug.

2. It goes into a database that nobody ever looks at. This one is much more common. You see, the "report a problem" feature doesn't exist for customers to actually get information about their problem to the company that makes the software. If that was how it worked, you'd need a staff of hundreds of support personnel working round the clock doing nothing but processing problem reports. The "report a problem" feature serves to give the user a feeling that someone will see their problem and that they'll be working on it, so the user won't call tech support. As a result the software company can save money on support rep hours.

New submitter poseur writes:

hey guyz get this new crypto for your puterz!!

-TOTALLY NOT DHS

Take this from a guy who saw someone go through a trial for doing The Very Bad Thing:

You will give them the password.

This is how it works:

"If you give us the password and let us prove you're innocent we'll let you go. If there's anything in there that would prove you guilty we'll reduce the sentence. If you don't give us the password and we have to crack the encryption ourselves and we find out you're guilty, you're going away for a very long time."

And then of course you give them the password, they find enough evidence to make you guilty and they don't reduce the sentence.

They just inflate the original sentence to a much worse sentence, and then deflate it to the level they were going to hit you with anyways.

The only time a mathematician every has an orgasm.