vocatus_gate

Only since Microsoft bought them out. Skype used to be a fantastic piece of reliable telephony software. Now it's a fantastic piece of NSA-backdoored garbage loaded with ads.

I use the utility "Everything" for instant search on Windows, works pretty well.

No. "Some of the blame"? Try "all of the blame." Windows Updates used to be pro-user. Now they're pro-Microsoft (pushing things Microsoft wants) and anti-user (routinely pushing 'features' no one wants or asked for).

I disabled it a long time ago and haven't looked back. Get back to me when MS starts remembering their customers are human beings again.

I remember reading about this a few years ago when I somehow ended up on the Wikipedia "List of famous unsolved murders" or something like that, and went down the rabbit hole. It's an eerie, creepy story, one of the few that left me feeling genuinely creeped out.

Still remember when it was $7 per bitcoin and sort of a joke. Hard to believe it's worth over $1700 now.

From Black's Law Dictionary:

Ponzi Scheme: "...Money from the new investors is used directly to repay or pay interest to earlier investors"

Bitcoin does not fit the definition of Ponzi scheme for numerous reasons:

- There are no paid dividends to anyone

- The purpose of using bitcoin isn’t to recruit new participants

- There’s no centralized body that funnels money up to the top

- Unlike Ponzi schemes, Bitcoin retains value and continues to function even if no new participants join the ecosystem

Bitcoin fails the litmus test for a Ponzi scheme in any number of ways. The boring reality is that it is just a value transfer network that grows more useful the more people join it (much like a telephone network grows more valuable the more people are reachable on it).

Do you even know what a ponzi scheme is?

Stop using the word "contentious" as an attempt to end discussion like the very thought of some idea being disagreeable to one or more people means it's not worthy of discussion.

Down in US-PHX

There's a Windows 10 store?

/s

You could be forgiven for making that mistake. The Combine soldiers in HL2 functioned in much the same way, even better in some cases. I've played through both games a number of times and the firefights play out differently each time.

:eyeroll: Sure, and MIT managed to transmit data wirelessly at 1 Tb/s one time. But we're talking about the real world and regular consumer hardware here.

I seriously doubt you're getting 75 MEGABYTES down over Wifi. Did you mean 75 Megabits (Mb)? There is a major difference between Mb and MB. 75 MB would be equal to 600 Mb per second.

> I also haven't rated or reviewed an app on the Play Store in about two years due to the Google Plus requirement there also.

Same. I purposefully stopped reviewing products on the Play/App store as soon as they forced you to use your G+ profile. Why on Earth does my real name or main profile need to be associated with a short app review?

It's sad but true. I can hardly trust any Google products any more because you never know when they're randomly going to give it the axe for no apparent reason.

Same here, weirdly enough. In order of most messages exchanged per service, in my friend circles it goes:

1. WhatsApp

2. GroupMe

3. Instagram DM

4. SMS

5. FB Messenger

6. Wickr

They're like the 1980's GM of chat products right now: too many overlapping products cannibalizing their own userbase.

> Any quotes newer than 19th century?

What you're doing is called Chronological Snobbery, acting as if an idea or concept has no value simply because of age.

31, but 32 in a few months, yeah. I'm single and unaffiliated at the moment, but hoping to be married in the next couple of years. Feels like the time is right to start that stage of life.

When I came back from my first tour to Iraq in 2004 (was 19 at the time) it took me almost a full year to feel mostly "home" again. But it definitely changed something about me, ever since that year I've never felt 100% "home" for some reason.

Ahh Maddox. Always thought he was a fairly clever writer, though his content declined in quality over the years.

> They still owe me like 15 euros of prepaid, but they're out of business by now.

Never lose hope.

I wintered over in Antarctica last year, and regularly had people DM'ing me on Instagram (probably searched for the #antarctica hashtag) and asking if it was actually real, if it was really an ice wall, if there were "secret military blackout zones" etc. It was pretty funny. I always took time out to answer them, but often I'd have to block them once it became apparent they were never going to be convinced.

Not quite!

SpaceX wants to launch 4,425 satellites into low-Earth orbits, with altitudes ranging from 715 miles to 823 miles. By contrast, the existing HughesNet satellite network has an altitude of 22,000 miles.

<...>

SpaceX expects its own latencies to be between 25 and 35ms, similar to the latencies measured for wired Internet services. Current satellite ISPs have latencies of 600ms or more, according to FCC measurements.

source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/space...

> We are talking about a monopoly on exyraordinarily high speed internet which is really only used for entertainment.

And online banking, and school, and working from home, and stock trading, and and and and....

Sure, they do alright I suppose. They're also not the most economically successful and powerful nation on Earth.

I basically post a warning that says "be aware that someone might attempt this." There's unfortunately nothing I can do about it with the way Syncthing is currently architected. We haven't had any malicious users yet but I'm sure we will eventually.

Fallback is just to provide a static .exe on the mirrors and leave the Resilio Sync node running alongside it.

That's the (hope|fear)

Masters is the new Bachelors.

> money is just fictional status points.

For fictional "status points" it sure has the ability to drastically change your life.