SteveGerencser

Very much this. I don't use Dropbox personally. But I have clients that use it extensively and when they all share large files with me I am suddenly in the pay tier just because someone added me to a folder with 100 10 minute videos in it.

It feels an awful lot like double and triple dipping to me.

I'm not surprised by this a all. I do PPC for a living and I find that a lot of ad spend is totally wasted on paying for clicks that you would have gotten anyway, especially on Google and on Mobile devices.

A lot of big brands bid on, and pay for, their brand terms because someone at some point told then that they should. So when a person uses search to find Uber, they get an ad first, then a regular listing second. And almost everyone clicks the first link. Take away the ad and the free click is first.

Because there are no real fumes. No more than anywhere else, and there is more likely to be a gas station with a restaurant (pizza/chicken whatever) in it than a restaurant at all. Small 'town' down the road has one gas station and one cafe. The cafe is only open for lunch. So a lot of the old timers gather at the gas station where they can get a coffee, a snack, or even a chicken dinner, and sit and chat with friends.

The nearest charging station to me is 45 miles away. I don't have an EV because it doesn't make sense for us living where we live. But I do end up driving by that one from time to time and it is always full.

People treat gas pumps as parking spots all the time. It's even more frustrating when you are driving a diesel and the only diesel pump at the station is blocked by a gas car and the owner has wandered off to get a coffee or use the restroom, all while multiple gas pumps sit empty.

And I wish that Linux fans would stop saying use Linux as if that is an answer for the vast majority of PC users in the world. It stinks of elitism on so many levels. And yes, I use Linux, but I would never consider putting it on a machine for my mom, or my sister, and nearly anyone else. Linux simply is not a viable solution for so many people.

My wife stopped applying for jobs involving government programs involving COBOL several years ago. She is very fluent in a lot of languages including COBOL, FORTRAN and so on. The issue is that these agencies never want to pay real wages for a very narrow skillset. The last one told her that their entire budget for the system rewrite was less than $100k and they were expecting to hire 4 programmers to get the job done because the consultant they had hired told them that it needed 4 programmers.

Because trust in your officers is staggeringly important. Even more so when you are put into a combat position and rely on those same officers to lead and guide men and women who may die. Honor and integrity in the military should be one of the most important elements of that person's character.

Add to that, if they can't be trusted in an academic setting where the consequences are a bad grade, how can you trust them in a situation where there are lives at stake?

Toys "R" Us also made the mistake of crawling into bed with Amazon rather than build out their own website for a couple years and let Amazon harvest all the toy sales data and then decided not to renew the contract between the two.

Take them all to a local children's hospital and drop them off if they embarrass you. Sell them on eBay by the kilo/pound if they embarrass you but you want the money in exchange for them.

You do realize that roughly 100% of your food comes from those rural areas that you so casually throw away as an expense on society?

Add to that, telecom companies have been collecting additional "fees" from every user for decades that was supposed to go for expanding infrastructure and never has been.

Agreed, average speed is generally a pointless metric with it comes to actual usage for many people. We are one of those rural families and we have to have both a 3Mbit DSL connection and a 4Mbit Satellite connection just to make sure that at least one service works well enough so we can work. We can't wait for Starlink to be available and will happily pay nearly any amount to have it if it means that I can kill 2 different really bad services.

Except not paying the bribe then opens you up to all sorts of incidental interactions with the sheriff's department.

I have stacks of anecdotal interactions with local level police (both sheriff and police) that nothing surprises me anymore.

Some of us have tried for decades. But people like cheap/free stuff and don't care what happens behind the curtain for the most part.

I had friends at the Intel fab in New Mexico in the 90s and this type of turf war was prevalent even then internally at the fab. Managers were constantly jockeying for position at the expense of manufacturing processes.

Just one anecdotal story, one of the wafer guys had an idea to improve a process. He went to his boss who shot it down instantly. Wafer guy knew he was right so went to another manager who liked the idea and implemented it. It ended up working and being a great idea. Instead of being rewarded for his idea, wafer guy was fired by his manager for failing to follow the chain of command.

It's built into the culture at Intel to be territorial to advance. It's been that way for at least 30 years. I personally don't see it changing any time soon.

It's interesting to me that no one had a cassette recorder in class. When I was working on my degree in the mid 90s nearly everyone had a recorder on their desk while they were taking notes. I didn't record every class or even every lecture, I focused mostly on the topics/lectures where I had difficulties. If I 'got it' I usually recorded over that tape.

I may even have a box of them somewhere around here in the barn.

I live at the other end of the state outside of Lexington TN and would gladly suffer Comcast and AT&T rather than TDS and their glitchy DSL service.

It was a cable cut. No internet, no portal, no registration.

But, do people actually know that when they purchase? If it were clearly stated anywhere on the box/sales copy that "you will see ads on this device" while the other one says "we won't shove ads on your device" I would wager the $10 more would be a bargain to nearly everyone.

But that information is never available at the point of purchase so most people get the surprise of see ads when they had no idea that was even a thing.

My desire to drive fast (my sweet spot is 78mph on the highway) is based solely on how far I have to drive when I do drive. I travel off of the farm less than once a week. But when I do leave the farm I can easily put 150 miles on the truck getting everything done that needs doing. And the bulk of that is on the freeway, once I get to it.

Or travelling to see my sick mother once a month (1200+ mile round trip) or my daughter as often as possible (1600+ mile round trip). Add to that I am on the large side of the equation at over 6'3" tall and near 300 pounds, and getting my v8 powered truck (20+ mpg) away from me will be a challenge.

We raise beef cows but all of our moms are shy nursers. Especially early on in a baby's life. We make sure the baby is alive and thriving and then stay away. I've seen mom's toss off a nursing calf just because she saw you looking at her so many times now that we try hard to avoid being seen at all in the first few days.

Very much this. Even more with places like ours where all of our cows have horns (highlands). I can see all sorts of bad things happening when two cows get hooked together when a horn slips under another cow's collar.

Add to that, my wife can gather and guide the entire herd with a bucket full of cubes, or every even random junk in a pinch to get them to go anywhere she wants whenever she wants.

Yup. Many rural areas like ours have weekly garbage collection. It's an ancient truck, with the same 3 guys ever since I moved here nearly 10 years ago. They hand toss every single bag. And when the truck breaks down they collect the trash in a pickup truck and handle it twice, once loading it and once unloading it.

While it may be less creepy, it's nearly impossible to break even running advertising this way. And until there is a way to promote a business, especially a new business, without some form of marketing, it's a necessary step in the online ecosystem. In the old days it was possible to fire blind ads and do okay. But as the costs continued to climb it became more important to be able to target your audience in a more accurate way. Retargeting/remarketing has become a very powerful tool in this process.

The last thing in the world I want to do is pay real money to put ads in front of someone that has no intention of buying and no interest in becoming a customer.

It's bad enough that the primary platforms are making the process more and more of a black box where they control every aspect of the marketing process.

Garmin has already gained FAA approval for an emergency autoland system that integrates with most modern private aircraft. It is designed to be used in case of an emergency where the pilot has "stopped functioning". It finds the nearest appropriate airport, announces it's intentions to ATC and then flies to and lands at that airport.

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/autonomi/

And city folk could pay the real cost of having their food grown and delivered to their doors and local stores. The whole issue works both directions but most people only tend to see their perspective. ;)

I had a client that didn't like to use passwords on their server because he could never remember them when he wanted to check something. His security solution was to put the server in a steel locker with 1 hole just large enough to pass a cord from a power strip and a CAT5 cable out of the side. Then lock the locker so no one had physical access to the server.

He did all this on his own on a Friday and then he left the CRT on all weekend. I got a call on Monday letting me know that "my" server had failed and I needed to get out there immediately. And of course, when I got there he was gone with the only key to the locker.

Out here it is purely economics and population density. I live in West TN and the nearest cell phone tower is 7 miles in a straight line from my house. There is one provider that works here, and a good signal is 2 bards, but usually, 1 is normal and things like 4g or LTE rarely work.

I offered $1/yr lease to the providers, all of them, to put a tower on my farm and not one of them is even a little interested.

I was super kicked back and mellow until I got a kid. Then I kicked worklife into high gear because I had a little mouth to feed and clothe. Kid got older, moved out, got married and I kicked back into mellow man.

Now we have a grandbaby in our lives and I'm back at work being more motivated to be more efficient and productive than ever so I can have the time to spend with her.

Sort of exactly the opposite of the article.

JD is on where near a monopoly on anything other than green paint. Mahindra, Case IH, Kubota, New Holland, and on and on are all equally available, and in most cases cheaper, alternatives that function just as well. We own both a Case and a Kubota.