Posts by Eddy Ito

Re: Winkle-heavy list

It seems rather easy, do a quick head count of each gender of the characters in most movies. Typically there are few females who play the romantic interest of select male characters. Hell even when the lead character is female (Tomb Raider, Alien, Snow White) there aren't many females in the movie. No, extras like 'waitress number 2' don't count.

Re: 2.2 meelion dollars

Actually one man was awarded $250,000 and the other $225,000 for 'hurt feelings'. The rest was a $1.75 million penalty for violating "the Plaintiffs' federally protected rights".

Re: Pedantic Grammar Nazi Compromise?

why .amazon.com shouldn't suffice, I do not understand.

I can only guess that this is a defensive measure on the part of Bezos and friends. They don't want people to be able to register names such as igotscrewedby.amazon or bitemyshineymetalass.amazon to name a couple of the more polite domains.

If that's the case, is there be some middle ground where the two sides could meet? For instance if Amazon.com offered non-profits in the Amazonas region a free .amazon domain or something in exchange for the TLD.

Re: Use Large Fonts.

Genre is a very important factor. If they only went strictly by character/word count then folks who write comic books graphic novels would get about two and a half page views regardless of the actual length of the book/magazine. Is a picture really worth a thousand (Amazon counted) words?

Re: Great company, great products...

Advertising doesn't do enough.

Especially since I can't recall when the last time I saw or heard a Blackberry advertisement in any medium. I hear iPhone ads all the time on the radio and see iPhone & Samsung ads everywhere. Perhaps that's why so many people think Blackberry disappeared. Whatever they do, they are going to have to start getting the word out that they are still around and making good stuff.

Re: These are primarily products for the US - not the UK

Radiant heat is common in the northeast and particularly in more rural areas where there is no natural gas line you'll find that oil fired boilers are quite common. In small homes all the radiators are tied in series but larger multilevel homes have the system zoned so it's possible to keep different temps in different areas. Also most don't have central AC as it's not particularly needed as it's only hot (>90 °F / 32 °C) and humid a few weeks out of the year.

Re: 35,000-40,000 BCE (Before Common Era, or AD).

Speaking personally, I'll be part of this rock by then. Unless of course some star traveling, bone bothering boffin comes along and finds my hiding place.

Re: Ha! - but in the end the pope adds nothing of value to the debate

... some of the US politicians are now cancelled out by their other patriarchal authority source, perhaps they might actually start thinking.

If you look at who this speaks to you'll notice that historically Catholics have been largely Democrats where the religious right are mostly Protestant and often evangelical. While the Catholic vote has evened out in the last few decades to a more 60/40 split it still favors Democrats. A quick look at the current congress shows 25 Catholics in the Senate, 16 are Democrats and of the House's 134 Catholics you'll find just over half are Democrats. What does this mean politically in the US? Mostly nothing since while it may be the largest religious denomination in the US it's still pretty small since all Catholics go into one bucket while Protestants get divided into their own particular flavors.

Re: That's not the point

Not to mention those "verify your identity" questions like high school, street I grew up on, mother's maiden name, etc.

Those questions are worse than useless since most of it is public information. You graduate high school - it's in the paper, your address was recorded by the registrar of deeds, your parents marriage license is recorded somewhere and their proud parents (your grandparents) undoubtedly had an announcement in the paper. Sure, it's a bit of work but it's all there and when you consider a good number of people still live in the town they grew up in it's quite a bit easier. Kids of career military might be a little harder to pin down if they moved several times but not too much since there are very detailed records of that too.

Re: Not a terrible idea

@DougS

As you say they've already baked in Android compatibility so what's the point of moving to full on Android? I'd say add iOS compatibility too but I don't see Apple letting anyone into the Apple/iTunes app store without an Apple device.

Re: @Oddlegs

@Lee D

Sure, the average meth head on the prowl for a quick buck walks up to the door knocks but it's clear you've never met a professional thief. Professionals plan ahead and if it takes a week to case a juicy target it isn't really an issue because they're going in to take everything. Professionals watch and look for trends and it's that much easier when you can get easy data directly from the electric company. Sure a professional isn't going to waste a bunch of time on a target that isn't worth it so many homes will likely be left for the smash and grab meth heads. Also, ringing the home phone means you need the number which may be unlisted (assuming a land line is even there) and with lots of folks now on packaged voip lines it's easy enough to have it ring through to a mobile so that's largely useless information.

Perhaps you haven't noticed but SoCal tends to be a rather warm place and because air conditioning is expensive I don't know anyone who leaves it run all day when they are out. Instead they have it set to kick in about 30 minutes before they expect to get home or those with indoor pets set a max temperature while they are out and drop it for their arrival. That change is a bit more than flipping on a few led bulbs and far in excess of 0.1 kWh. Consider when you're looking at a 2.5 ton unit you're talking 8.8 kW of output. Run that for 30 minutes and it's a giant change and quite obvious when looking at the hourly power usage trace.

"this IS the 21st century!"

Which is exactly why you don't use iPhones, they're too easy to locate. You want the dumbest phones you can get your hands on, preferably ones without gps and on two different carriers.

Re: How about this...

If they eat their own dog food perhaps someone could find a way in and issue an RMA to every customer. Free shipping included of course.

here

Re: Neanderthal

... supposedly only 0.12% DNA difference.

Horizontal gene transfer, it's a bitch.

Re: So we cant trust HTTPS then.

You could take the NSA's approach where the reason for communication is to spread disinformation but everyone listening to that communication knows that it's disinformation. Fortunately we know that they know it's disinformation so we know the truth won't be believed. Of course, they know that we know that they know so would expect the truth and we can't have that. But if we know they know we know that they know would they know that too? Hmm, this leaves us with two options, say nothing or say everything with a sly smile so they think you're up to something.

Re: Flying *Car* .NE. "light sport aircraft"

My point was more toward the training requirements that differentiate a driver's license from a flying car "driver's" license. Perhaps when the robot car is in every driveway will the robotic flying car become a real possibility only because the average idiot will think playing with drones will count as "driving" experience for his flying car.

Re: @ Pointless golden record

And the chance of this planet being run by chimps, gorillas and orangutans in 10,000 years?

Re: I'd hate to see some trolling venture capitalist lose his claim for "imaging technology"

I think any troll should need to put up a large sum of money (10 times demanded?) and be ready to forfeit if they lose the suit.

That won't work because it gives an unfair advantage to the megacorps - effectively saying Apple can sue me but I can't sue Apple because I can't afford the price of admission.

Re: But wait!

The easy way around that is to remove the sim card and update over wi-fi. When I tried to update my Passport over T-Mob it told me that 10.3.1.1779 was the latest but after pulling the sim I was able to get this update.

That said, I'm not really keen on not being able to remove the new Amazon app and with the permissions it wants I'm not about to try it.

Re: Market Suicide Or Murder?

I think part of it is that it seems to me that people are starting to change their preferences and it goes way beyond entertainment. People are moving away from the passive approach and have a desire to do things and TV in general doesn't really fit as well as it did. The days of the TV being on for hours at a time are fading fast since the internet and games have taken its place and I don't see it coming back regardless of the programming. Maybe the networks will try another hospital or mystery show since the cop shows and rom coms have dominated for a while. Oh, I know a mashup of Columbo and ER.

Re: Quart in a pint pot

From Google's skynet pics it looks like the solar array is actually across the street. At the moment it looks like the images are being updated because the landscape changes radically depending on zoom level. Bing maps knows nothing about it.

Re: wankers.

Actually Japan recently took the number one spot from China as top debt holder. Even so all foreign debt holders combined only account for about 1/3 of the total debt; see page 43 of this PDF.

Re: Pots and pans

So Weave is Google's version of the Twitter of Things?

Dishwasher: @fridge @range Pots and pans are #clean!

Fridge: Cool @dishwasher! @range Roast is thawed ready 4 #dinner

Range: @dishwasher - lol, so what? @fridge Dude, chill #dinner !4 six hours #wtf?

Fridge: @dishwasher, sounds like @range is feeling the heat. #slacker

Re: This is the way it should be. Insurers should require insurees to maintain "due diligence"

It's nice that it seems everyone is finally starting to pay attention. The insurance company couldn't pick a better time since it looks like Congress is also finally getting their act together with HR 2205 and matching S 961 coming out the gate. While the bills aren't perfect it's a start. The first obvious defect in the two bills is that they come out of the gate exempting governmental entities.

Re: The scenario is far-fetched

"48 per cent of users have paid with Apple Pay just one time"

That's the best mark. It's all set up, used once and never looked at again. That easily gives the thief a month to plunder as much as they like.