Google can lock you out of your account even if you have the right password.
555 karma · joined April 7, 2017
And no I don't have any "techbro" friends who work for Google.
Lessons:
Do not use Google unless you are OK with losing your account if they one day decide to hold your identity and data hostage.
Even if you PAY Google ("Google Apps" or whatever the fuck they are calling it these days), you are still at risk.
Set up mail forwarding in Gmail and migrate to a service not run by an advertising monopolist.
The last (and final) one I watched (just to see how bad it was) had a 30 second (I am not shitting you) beer commercial complete with the signature Michael Bay 360 degree shot.
And not to mention the Chinese - "we must call central government" - pandering.
You can also runs pixelserv that will return a 1 pixel image so you don't get any errors.
There's a certain feeling of "Gotcha! I still got it. Can't full me, Diet Coke".
Also good shows and movies do not do this. Never once noticed product placement in The Wire or Breaking Bad, Pontiac Aztec notwithstanding.
IIRC the standard is:
22 minutes for 30 min shows
44 minutes for hour long shows
You can go to RARBG and check the MediaInfo for any show.
So you get 16 min of ads every hour. So a quarter of each hour is ads.
Always a clash of values there.
I think people in the West who do not have to experience having one guy as "president" for 20+ years are either naive or ignorant of how these autocrats or kleptocrats operate.
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Fun fact: Belarus still has the KGB and a lot of Soviet era imagery on emblems and such.
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I know one older gentleman playing a FPS. He is not very good, but better than the majority.
It's all about community though. If you play on the same server or a not-very-popular game, you would soon know all the "regulars". The actual game is there just to hook you in. You stay for the community.
And of course you got down voted.
There's a whole industry whose goal is to spread disinformation.
So one has to be extra careful of any hidden agendas or biases.
It just smelled like "Americans For Prosperity" type deal, hence the suspicion.
I think I just qualified to work in Congressional Budget Office!
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The creator of ABP ("Wladimir"?) is a scammer, con man, and malware distributor.
He created an adblocking extension.
He then used the auto-update feature to update his extension to include "acceptable ads".
I was not warned about this. I discovered this accidentally after going into ABP settings.
"Acceptable ads" IS the antithesis of adblocking. Do you know the malware that masquerades as anti-virus software, etc., euphemistically called "potentially unwanted programs / PUP"? ABP is EXACTLY the same.
Vladimir gained my trust by providing an adblocking software. He then betrayed that trust.
He is a con man in my book.
/rant
>Looking at the finances of people who have more money that you or I do can be a little unsettling. If we’re not careful, the financial voyeurism can also foster a sense of ingratitude. That’s not good…
"Ingratitude"?
Right after US congress passed the tax cut that will add 1,000,000,000 to the deficit?
Is the author - "Steve" - funded by the Mercers or the Kochs?
There was recently a NYT article on trying to get a ballet shoe emoji (high heel shoes & sexism related) into Unicode.
Sarcasm should be in Unicode!
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>Sarcasm, Inc. was formed in 2006 to pursue this idea, and with a great deal of effort and undying support from family and friends, the punctuation mark for sarcasm came to life.
This is why America is the greatest country in the world!
Sarcasm Inc even has (sarcastic?) shareholders and apps!
Yes Flash with it's weekly or sometimes daily security vulnerabilities was bad, but HTML5 is not "better".
It is design by giant corporations (DRM inside your CPU, inside your browser, etc.) FOR other corporations. It is not designed for people, for freedom. It is regulatory capture by Silicon Valley "techbros" of... Internet's standardizing bodies instead of government regulating agencies.
Hence when I recently used the browser (designed by an advertising company BTW), websites just freely play annoying sounds.
This is not "better". It's worse IMHO, since at least with Flash you had click-to-play.
/Rant
In OSI model IIRC:
Application (software) is layer 7.
Physical connection is layer 1.
I am sure somebody will correct me.
I think we need to standardize the sarcasm tag on the Internet.
Not one of those RFC that no one implements, but something concrete, perhaps baked into the HTML standard. (If the W3C include DRM, they can include sarcasm).
Or maybe something like ISO, but people ignore them too.
/S
I hope you do not work on missiles or on passenger aircrafts!
I think these are the "new" sanctions that concern Putin.
Basically Congress told the IC to draw up a list of Russian oligarchs, so they may be targeted.
Since a lot of these oligarchs have money in the West (houses in Italy and Miami) this "Putin aide" may be worried about his future.
Don't forget Putin is getting another 6 (?) year term.
Pornhub ARIA @Pornhub Pornhub would never play you like that fam Netflix US @netflix To the 53 people who've watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you? 7:47 AM · Dec 11, 2017
I sure hope so!
A few thoughts WRT that NetFlix tweet:
The "data" culture is so pervasive, the want of privacy is so weak, that these corporations are not ashamed to post tweets like that. And the lack of outrage, which should be easier to amplify and snowball due to the Internet, tells me, that the battle for privacy is lost (or impossible to win).
That Netflix tweet made me feel like a prostitute TBH, like a cog in a machine. Brazil, the movie comes to mind.
I got angry, took my drill, a piece of metal, couple of screws and connected the whole thing Mad Max style. Yes, they were quite uncomfortable.
And you couldn't really wear them in public too.
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And yes hd380s seem to have longer lasting headband than the hd280s.
You won't even have to look at their dirty, disgusting faces, just count them like cattle.
In a large city like NYC, neon-green would stands out very nicely.
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Also related:
The Sennheisers branded ear pads or Brainwavz (IIRC) ear pads are a bit expensive ($20+).
You can get generic "memory" foam ones on AliExpress for $4.
It's not actually memory foam and they might send you the wrong type, and it's a tight fit (just remember to breathe !?) but they work.
Often they are just Chinese-speaking American entrepreneurs. The problem is the lack of IP protection in China. And lack of any interest in branding and brand differentiation, hence you got "brands" that sounds like they were picked via /dev/rand. And of course everything is probably manufactured in the same 3 or 4 factories.
Lev Andropov: It's stuck, yes?
Watts: Back off! You don't know the components!
Lev Andropov: [annoyed] Components. American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!!!
Recently Amazon made it much harder to select sellers.
Now on some products, the page is so confusing that you don't know is it "Fullfilled by Amazon" or you are buying from someone in China.
Race to the bottom and all...
Sorry to be a bit of an asshole.
Do not buy Chinese crap. It's a lottery.
My Sennheisers (made of plastic BTW) have been in use since 2014. My previous Sennheisers broke (just the headband) after a couple of years.
Bought $30 Taiwanese headphones, good Amazon reviews, but the headband is too small. And the microphonics is terrible. Sigh.
Recently bought boots, Made in China. Size is about 1.5 units off.
For a certain class of goods and for reasonable price points, you do get what you pay for.
Sometimes it seems it's more about job security. How many rewrites do you need?
Mozilla's Law:
(Use McConaughey Voice)
As Intel processors get faster... Mozilla's software stays the same... speed.
Firefox 24 in a VM
It's insecure, slow, but it's the last good version of Firefox.
Anything after 24, has Australis, which is the beginning of the end of Mozilla IMHO.