Try calling for support from a small or medium business. Too small to outsource, their staff is more likely than not to have lots of contact with the people who made the stuff in the first place. You can get good results.

I work at a larger place than that, but instead of the traditional three levels of support we effectively have two - second level and third level, all internal. The people you get on the phone when you call know how to think, and solve 90% of incoming calls (including many tougher calls because problems have escalated before and documentation and training have come down from third level so we don't need to get bothered.) If we had a lesser help desk we'd have to hire more expensive headcount to actually deal with issues - it makes good business sense to keep them in-house and well trained. Oh, and we promote heavily from within, so everyone on the desk knows it's in their best career interests to soak up as much as they can. It makes them more hire-able internally and externally. I think they handle north of 30K calls a month with 24/7 coverage, it's pretty impressive what they do with a fairly small and focused group.

Sorry to break it to you, but Avengers: EMH has been cancelled. It won't be renewed for the 3rd season. It's being replaced with Avengers: Assemble to bring it in line with the Ultimate versions. Scuttlebutt says that Jeph Loeb doesn't like long plot arcs and wants every episode to be self contained and standalone. Good way not to be in touch with your audience.

I've got no problems side-loading e-books to the Kindle Fire. There is a trick to it though. It's easy as pie to side-load them, but if you stick them in your Docs directory and want them to show up as books, you need to turn your Fire off and back on once, not just hibernate it. (To turn off, hold down power for 5 or 10 seconds).

Someone at Jack Daniel's has heard of the Streisand Effect, and is doing a good understanding what it means.

Is this good business sense? Abso-freaking-lutely. For exactly the reasons you state. They couldn't pay for a marketing campaign that would generate this much good will this quick. Certainly if they tried it would be orders of magnitude more than offering to help him design a new cover.

I'm not saying they're doing it manipulatively. I'm saying it's very possible for a corporation to act well and in doing so still "enhance shareholder value" or whatever.

Cheers, good job JD! You show class.

Let's see how that goes for the general public.

First, they need to recognize a fraudulent charge. That means they need to go over it in detail every month. If more than one person has a card they all need to. And recall all of their spending if there's something that could be/could not be (such as an extra but reasonable charge from a store you do frequent.)

Second, they need to have it taken off their bill. Just not paying something (as the quote suggests) is against your contract with the credit card people, and it's not a good thing. If instead the quote means telling them specifically you won't pay X as it's fraudulent, they don't just take it off the bill. They instead waive it while an investigation is done.

Third, they need to make sure not paying actually sticks. We had a second charge from a large chain made about 3 minutes after a valid use. It brought the total between the two to just under $500, which was a threshold at the time. We told the card about it, they said they'd investigate. Several months later, they jsut reinstated the charge. We had to call them back, they said the investigation found nothing and was closed, and they were charging us. (Mind you, we had no notification of this except it just showing up on our bill again.) We got them to reopen it, requested a copy of the receipt, pointed out how the signature bore NO RESEMBLANCE to ours, and then they finally removed it. If there was any investigation, it obviously didn't happen to look at that. (Funny note: the signature isn't authorization, it's your agreement with the merchant to pay as outlined in your credit card agreement. Not password-like at all.)

You, like us, may go through your bills religiously. But I doubt everyone does, and I don't happen to think that they then "deserve" getting defrauded because they trust a service they have reasonable expectations to be secure.

Yeah, IP ownership is a sticky one. My company currently has while I'm on the clock or while I'm using their equipment, which I can live with since it clearly defines how something is not theirs and is reasonable.

I've heard of a large company where in the orientation they had a mandatory part about IP where they paid every new employee $1 and had them sign that it was payment for whatever they came up with while they were at the company. That ugly. That was back in the late '90s, don't know if it's still the case.

Remember, you don't have to agree to a contract. Yeah, I know that sounds like the standard "if you don't like it leave" that's only good in a world where you don't need a job. But when you're first going in changing specific parts of a contract is only a moderate deal, not a big deal. IP rights is one of those places. Stick up for yourself and you'll find that the all-encompassing written-by-lawyers contract that takes everything isn't the only option. Enough valuable people don't agree with it all that they are used to some modification.

My company is upfront about their use policy, and anything I do during work hours AND/OR with their equipment falls under them. For instance, if I use my personal PC at home at night to write code, it's not under them. But if I do it during work hours (regardless of who's equipment, say if I'm working from home that day) or if I use their equipment (regardless of when), it falls under them.

So spending my lunch hour (my time) using their equipment and their internet connection still falls under them. And they are clear and communicative about it. Consider the HR mess that could be caused by surfing to a pron/racist/etc site while on company premise using your work machine and someone else seeing and having a problem.

Standard disclaimer - if I had a problem with it, I could leave. I have left a company in the past when they changed contract terms. But in this case they are upfront about it so I know what is expected and find it reasonable from their PoV.

As a side note, never go to banking or other sites like that from someone else's machine anyway.

Do remember that he [Obama] was the first (and so far only) Presidential candidate to forgo Federal matching funds for his campaign, since skipping those funds meant he didn't have to abide by the campaign finance limits.

I don't believe that is accurate. This suggests that Steve Forbes skipped on matching funds in 1996 and 2000. G. W. Bush skipped on matching funds in 2000 and 2004, which caused Howard Dean and John Kerry to forgo in 2004 as well. Over the last decade, everybody who wins, forgoes matching funds, as well as a significant number of the losers.

There are valid reasons to say Obama is doing things that are bad, but I think we have a real tendency to say "He's the first to do this!" when he's doing stuff that has been the trend for quite some time.

Yeah, security questions were nifty the first time. Now I feel like they all ask the same questions so if I honestly answered I'd be decreasing my security on every existing site whenever I signed up for a new site.

Now I have a schema for answers that vary non-intuitively by site, but don't match the questions. (Or at least aren't the answers to the questions.)

Kudos, you sounds like you're one of those in a minority who do things one right way. (Note: not the only right way.) First, you use different passwords on different accounts, which is a problem the article doesn't (and can't) address. It doesn't matter if it'll take 900 years to break one site A if you use the same password on sites B through Q and site L stores them in cleartext and is compromised. One professional group I'm part of (not IT) used to send me a copy of my username and password in cleartext via snail mail as part of their regular communications. WTF? First, you store it so you can see it, and then you USPS it to me without me expecting it? And have a habit of doing that? Ever heard of identify theft?

I don't think I could manage your way - I'd have too many customized subset password files floating around. One for work that includes some personal things I need to hit to do my job. One at home, which would include some work since I'm on call often. One mobile, since there are a few things I don't care if gets intercepted. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't try - it would cure the issue I have where I don't log into something for a few months and I forget what password I chose for that. I have a rough schema that with a what it's for and some other general knowledge I could get it in a few dozen guesses, but still.

Sure, I will support in a reasonable way. But perjuring myself, using non-work-related accounts, is not reasonable. At the very least, I'm lying to friends and family (having no experience with it but saying it's good).

As an American, I hope this get challenged as well. Every time I hear about another incident by DHS/TSAICE it makes me cringe how the US government treats people. Any people.

The stories I hear don't match up with the "country vision" of liberty and freedom that the US was founded on. I'm sure for every sensationalized story there may be plenty of cases where things are done right, done sanely, and done with dignity for all involved. But even one story about the excesses in the name of security or the fight-against-terrorism should prompt investigation and swift resolution, much less the continuing flood of them.

Man, someone start a Kickstarter to purchase this, with the sole intention of requiring licensing or takedown from the original copyright owners who assigned their rights to Righthaven to sue with.

We all kick in a few bucks, buy it out, and get to serve delicious irony on those who were trolling for $$.

Big question is why they have the restrictions. Often it's because they are afraid of lawsuits and liability. Or even parents kicking up a fuss. "I came to visit my poor innocent Johnny, and his roommate was showing some unimaginable* filth!"

If legal is pushing it to avoid things like "the university is promoting hate crimes/pr0n/racism/drug use/alternate lifestyles/etc.", that's a very different route to try to change it than "Dean XYZ wants to try to keep the internet 'educational only'", again different than "IT manager has limited bandwidth and is trying to restrict data hogs", still different than "some guy wants to put his stamp of morality on everything".

Understanding the reason behind the restrictions is the first step in understanding how to change it.

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* You might be able to imagine it, because you've heard of Rule #34.

The funny thing is both sides of that equation are saying the same thing: We're given a limited amount of resources from up the chain, and need to stretch them as far as we can. The developer is looking for more tools and ways to multiply their productivity, even if the cost is more for IT to support. IT is looking to stretch their productivity by providing standardized environments that they can provide support on, instead of trying to train everyone for the "long tail" of each developer's preferred environments.

The limiting factor in both cases is the resources given from up the chain. Often in very penny-wise and pound-foolish ways, such as thinking equipment is expensive but people's time is cheap. Either way, both sides of the equation have the same limitations from the same people, but see each other as the villains as they try to work around those imposed limitations.