> Gmail's security sucks and it's customer service is non-existent.

If you want customer service become a customer. Users of free accounts are not customers. A business's customers are the people who pay them money: advertisers, in Google's case.

> Google encourages people to trust gmail with their most sensitive personal
> data. I think their negligence and lack of response regarding their own
> products' defects borders on criminal.

You got what you paid for.

For email (Webmail and POP/IMAP) and Usenet I suggest Newsguy. It's an actual business, not an advertising agency.

Most people call that a gaming console generation, not a personal computer.

People don't have much means to see 3D photos "correctly" because they just don't care much beyond short amusement value, a gimmick. Take this 3D Yugoslav toy that I mentioned; I can't quickly find it via google, but it was essentially a cardboard disk with dozen or so pairs of small cliches (photos of various landmarks), which you put into small handheld viewer. From the 70's.

It worked really good, the effect was very convincing (of course minus usual inability to focus naturally and natural paralax...). No obvious faults with it. It would be trivial even back then to give people the opportunity of making disks with their own set of photos; making those photos would be a bit of a problem of course. Now making such viewer + disks is even more trivial, and 3D digicam could cheaply and easily provide source photos. Nobody has done it; perhaps because such technology can't work as a one time gimmick (returning every few years), but must be sustainable in photolabs around the world. Which it can't really do, people are perfectly satisfied with boring 2D photos.

No, you're idea is to allow your antivirus provider to install a kill switch on your system. I'm not arguing against upgrading or doing so in a timely manner, but when it comes to security being a sheep will get you eaten by wolves. That is exactly what you're doing.

Well, it probably flagged it as plaigiarism. Probably gave a comparison of the original source and the submitted source. Then if there are obvious similarities they simply say "yep, definitely plaigiarised".

They probably never considered that over more than one year that a student would use the same code in the same class. It was some years ago now, so maybe they have refined their process.

The problem with this is for people redoing classes. I had redone a class and submitted code which included a function that I had written in the same class the first time round. I got flagged as plaigiarising. Fortunately this one got sorted out and they realised that they were in fact wrong.

My wife, however, was taking a non computer-science course and between the two years there was the same assignments for a class she needed to repeat. She changed it to make it better and submitted it. Then she was flagged as plaigiarising. It took 2 years to sort out that the lecturer was a douche and they were eventually fired. It was a lot of effort to go to though. So, automated tools are great, but it does need to be adressed by humans (which TFA and TFS does say too).

I apologize for assuming you did not shut things down or inform your customers. Now, my sympathies extend to you as well. Too bad we don't have any real meaningful legislation to allow recourse in these types of issues.

My condolences.

More like everyone wants a 2nd gen SSD, and distributors and retailers want to unload their stock of garbage-ass 1st gen drives. I know what MSRP is on some of these drives, and I can only come to the conclusion that retailers are trying to get consumers to pay for 1st gen shit that will never, EVER sell. Not me. I already paid the early adopter tax ($400 for 16GB), and got burned (drive controller chip has no cache, causing stuttering). A lot of people paid the early adopter tax, and got fucking burned. I'll be waiting for 2nd(or higher) gen drives with 80+GB for $100.

And I like it. So there...

(really; minimalistic, amount and type of chrome finally reasonable)

Though tbh I wonder more when we'll see "iPhone nano" and "iPod Touch nano" (yeah, I think it's more when than if). This year the tech should be there to have something comparable to, say, iPhone 3G; small amount of storage and cheap ARM (Cortex-A5 showed up recently) under the hood, lower quality and perhaps slightly smaller screen, many colors, smaller in two dimensions (outline more closely following the screen) but much more chubby; hence making this "leaked" model (which is even thinner than previous one...) more "sexy", more "desirable".

I was just musing at what the court case might be like. Probably a jury case. First, select jurors that are easily persuaded by faulty logic. Then present theory after theory to make the jurors themselves feel unable to trust their own common sense. Overwhelm them with details and information. Sadly, propaganda tricks are commonplace (not at all illegal) in the courtroom.

I would hope that common sense would help someone judge which explanations are more likely and which ones are less likely. It's difficult to absolutely rule out the possibility that the scanner incident helped to cause these problems, but not hard to make the case that there are several other _far_ more likely scenarios where the scanner was purely harmless.

Flashing a price scanner in someone's eyes is rude and annoying, but so is waving your hand in front of someone's face, shouting at them, etc. Permanent harm could not have been anticipated. You can't sue someone for being a little bit rude one day. ... Can you?

It's not really that complex. Something like 80% of people can get the largest refund possible by filling out the a single form, with around 15 entries on it. The only way this isn't true is if you spend a lot of your paycheck on things like student loans, mortgage interest, charity, or medical bills. All of which encourage things that help to stabalize our society, so I don't really see much of a problem with them personally.

And considering how racist we humans are, meeting the aliens will def not be very peacefull, atleast at first, followed by decades of hatred. So it might be that we are better off not meeting aliens anytime soon.

Or maybe we meet aliens, but the distance is so vast, and neither of our technologies are capable for actually getting into same physical place, and we may only communicate with vast latency.

or maybe they are so much more technologically advanced, that despite them being very friendly our hatred pushes them away.

Who knows, possibilities are endless, but very few of them seem to be positive.

And the drive to show quarterly increases in profit is in turn driven by greedy stock market speculators that treat companies with stable profits as losers.

I am the only one that is surprised people actually pay for a screensavers these days when there are so many wonderful free ones? Come to think of it-- I wonder if the same the people who buy things through spam....

There were times when I would actually code for 35-45 hours a week. Assuming "code" includes the wrote, run, crash, debug, rinse and repeat cycle.

These days I am lucky if I actually code more then 5 hours a week on average. I spend most of my times doing administrative tasks, being interrupted by coworkers and attending ineffective meetings.