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I heard about the Sprout yesterday and its nagged me since I woke up this morning. I've seen a few tech pundits praise the computer as the future but I can't help but feel like this is 3-4 levels removed from the problem its actually trying to solve. While the popular opinion, possibly paid for, is that this product is what will save the reputation of Windows 8 by proving that touch is a valid form of input for a Desktop. I'm not arguing that, I think its interesting and even novel; what I am arguing is that this is going to end up being just as, if not more-so, expensive as buying a $1,200 monitor that has touch support with more proprietary features than anyone needs. I'll take a step back and ask the important question, What is HP trying to solve with this product? They are trying to add touch support to PC and frankly I think that it demonstrates that it could work but I doubt the approach they have taken to get there. Its over complicated and it doesn’t seem as flexible as it could be to accommodate the widest audience, its certainly pitched at the niche of techno-centric people who want the newest thing and that is exactly what this is. I personally don't see the need for an overhead projector/camera combo or a huge mat that sits front and center. Why I find the Sprout impractical is two fold, How flexible would it be to unconventional desktop settings, and why the hell can't we just use the phones and tablets we already own? The second point hits closer to home on why the Sprout struck a nerve. Since I repaired my first phone I've wondered why there wasn't a mode that would let me use it as a generic track-pad on PC. I've replaced keyboard/mice every 3-5 years as the hardware wears out but I've never once had to replace a phone screen unless I dropped it, face down, on concrete and shattered it. It may be expected to replace a phone every 18 months once they become outdated but it would make more sense to me to upcycle or integrate those devices into a Desktop work surface than to just toss them into the junk drawer with the rest of my forgotten electronics. The articles that have popped up seem more like product placement, native advertizing, than genuine reviews of technology. we should be critical of them [the technology] because it skips over the lowest common denominator. Sure you can install a hacked solution [on your phone] but they only work so long as some process/service is running on the host computer. To do that the PC has to be running and some flavor of network has to be established. As far as I understand it Google, by inheriting some tricks from Linux, has support for emulating a USB Gadget [i.e. keyboard/mouse] and it can be accomplished by patching the [OS] software running on just about any device, installing a local app; but rather than device OEMs investing time to make this a stable integration with their custom skins/kernels; it is something that is pretty much reserved for the hacker elites out there. None the less I plan on trying once I build up the courage to re-flash my phone. I can't help but be critical of HP and Microsoft for pushing products to market without considering the lowest common denominator, even if that comes from their bitter rivals. Rather than having the cart jump the horse and solve a problem with the aspirations of selling some niche hardware; I wish they would just come out and fix the problems we already have. I get so wound up about these things because of how technical and unsupported they are, how difficult it is to solve like a rare glitch buried on the 20th page of a Google search.

My grandma just bought an iPad and had an internet service set up so she can communicate with her kids/grandchildren better. I've been trying to help her understand how to use email, Facebook and the differences between texting, iMessages, Facebook instant messages etc, but without being there to show her hands on, I don't think is really grasping how to maneuver her way around to most benefit from social media and how to best use this tool available to her. My question: is there some resource/ source of information that I can email her that is easy to understand, comprehensive, thorough, simple and user friendly that will allow her to learn to communicate over the internet, use Facebook, email (preferably with some form of visual/demonstration?) any information helps!

To anyone who has been using or recommending OpenDNS: If you have a dynamic IP address (you probably do), or if you use a VPN service, your browsing could be censored at ANY TIME. I've been recommending OpenDNS for years, and I've been using it myself for longer. It seems like a good alternative to spotty ISP DNS servers, and is less likely to go out if I ever switch providers for any reason. However, I've recently learned that it will apply sweeping censorship to entire swaths of IP addresses, without the vast majority of users' consent. The heart of the problem is that OpenDNS has a parental control feature . While this may sound like a good thing -- barring the fact that it can be easily bypassed by any kid with half a brain these days -- the issue is that it applies by IP address with nothing but a free registration, and will never stop applying to that IP. In other words, let's say Overprotective Parent X decides that little Billy's development is being harmed by all those porn sites. And any site that hosts any adult content, even if it's user-submitted and not the intent of the site as a whole. And SFW sites about sexuality. And while we're at it, websites about video games, politics, religion, dating, shopping, and news . [These are all categories that OpenDNS allows you to block.]( First, O.P.X. registers a free OpenDNS account, [right here.]( It requires even less personal information than the likes of Google or Microsoft accounts do these days, which means they might as well be Anonymous V. Anonymoose for all anyone will be able to tell later. Then, later, O.P.X.'s home IP address changes, because dynamic IPs exist. This likely happens frequently, especially if O.P.X. uses a mobile network. The settings are still on the old IP, and cannot be disabled or changed without contacting OpenDNS support personally, which in my experience, takes days to respond to such tickets. Now some other poor sap has O.P.X.'s previous IP and parental control settings. Of course, O.P.X. is as persistent as it is stupid, and upon finding that the settings are gone, they set them again. But this time, they install a dynamic IP sync tool, which automatically applies their settings to EVERY IP ADDRESS THEY'RE EVER ASSIGNED. The end result is that the parental control settings of a single user will spread like a cancer through the entire IP range of your provider , and anyone using OpenDNS within that range will be unable to uncensor the web unless they can figure out what's going on and wait out a multi-day support ticket from OpenDNS. Which, by the way, might not solve the problem, because OpenDNS will RE-apply the settings if O.P.X. ever gets that IP address again .

So, here's my situation. My Facebook (which I could really care less about) and my gmail account have both been hacked. The only solution I could think of is to try to change my password, but in order to do so, these sites need to send your new password info to my alternate e-mail. This would be an easy fix, except I haven't used my alt in, like, five years and I forgot my password. In order to recover this password I need to log into my hacked e-mail account. vicious circle.

Because I believe in giving props where due, I'm sharing this experience... Last night, around 10 PM, our AT&T U-Verse Internet went out. I was peeved, and called tech support, who then transferred me to Tier 2 tech support. They then explained that it was a regional outage. At this point, me and my roomates were fairly pissed [and inebriated], so we walked over to the local store to grab a six-pack. Lo and behold, as we walk out the gate of the apartment complex, I see one of those gray telco boxes that are all over the place along sidewalks. Except this one wasn't beside the sidewalk...it was all over it. Apparently some dude drunkenly demolished our telco box. Fast forward to this morning: internet is back, I take a walk and see a plastic temporarily rebuilt telco box. So props to AT&T for being able to rebuild and rewire one of those things so quickly.

We read a lot about Google's data-gathering practices, from storing searches for years to never deleting Gmail messages and more. When all of this data is looked at together, it can form a pretty detailed picture of a group of people -- or even an individual. A lot of people say they are privacy-conscious, but then they use Google Chrome, Gmail, Google Search, etc. How much do your privacy concerns affect your real-world computing behavior?

I work for a company that sells a monitoring solution that it's trying to compete with big players like EMC2, TIVOLI, etc. In the past it was easy to assign a value to the monitoring agents we develop based on the size of the implementation and the customer requeriments. Nowadays, we have to start selling little ready-to-use knowledge packs in a world where an infrastructure can virtualized in a few servers and even be managed remotely in the cloud. In the short term we are going to release VMware and SAP agents. How the hell do you think should we license them? Should we charge per user? per virtual machines? per server? How much? I apologize in advance if this is the wrong place to post this inquiry. Just thought I might as well give it a shot. Thx! Throwable account for obvious reasons.

I was looking at a help desk request today that involved our web proxy server and ran across something that made me laugh. There's a built-in policy called "Block Except During Lunch (12-1)"...I figure it's set up to block sites that fall into the "entertainment" category, except over the lunch hour. I hopped in just to look at the policy details. No. It allows all site categories all the time, except for the porn category, which is only allowed from 12pm to 1pm. It's not a policy that we have configured for anyone, obviously... but I suppose someone somewhere wants to surf some porn over their lunch hour.

That's right, Filezilla stores your credentials for everything you log into in a plain text XML file. Don't believe me? Go to Start > Run, type in "%appdata%\Filezilla\" and check out either recentservers.xml or filezilla.xml My main problem with this is the fact that it doesn't give you any warning that it's doing this. I realize it's an open-source program, and it's up to the developer to make decisions about this behavior, but if you look at the forum responses from the developer you'll see things that should make everyone clench up at least a little bit. "I do not see any harm in storing credentials as long as the rest of your system is properly secure as it should be." ~botg (the dev) This response, to any person who knows anything about security should boil your blood. The idea that you can have a 'secure' system (especially running windows) is ridiculous. This is even after a bugfix was posted outlining the EXACT Windows API calls used to protect configuration files of this type. (thanks to joshbw) I myself personally love this program, but this is a major concern for me, as this can have dire consequences in a multi-user environment, and malware/viruses are actively exploiting this behavior to find more spreading points: I know before I knew that it did this, I logged into my resources from public computers using filezilla, think back at how many of you have too. Time to change some passwords? I thought so. I've been aruging with the dev in this forum post: And I posted something to Full-Disclosure: The developer thinks that obfuscating the passwords doesn't help anything, and he clearly doesn't understand that security has an onion model. If you can compromise one layer, you shouldn't have the 'keys to the kingdom' sitting in plain text anywhere. Just because some obfuscation techniques can be figured out and reversed, doesn't mean they shouldn't be implemented. Not to mention that there are built in API calls to do this exact thing on behalf of programs. He just refuses to use them. I think with a push from the security, and the Reddit communities we can convince him to make the relatively simple changes to at least warn users of this behavior, and possibly mitigate the storage of passwords in plain text. I need to send this guy a poster with the look of disapproval 8 feet high. ಠ_ಠ Please help reddit!

So I've seen reddit pull some amazing things out of the hive mind, and I need that power now- I've got a periodically changing set of files that need to be placed onto USB drives to be given away. But copy and pasting fifty drives at a time gets VERY annoying. I'm sure theres got to be a way to tell some program that a particular folder needs to be coppied to drives W/X/Y/Z. So can anyone tell me how to save one folder to multiple USB pen drives at once?

Was told by a friend to post this tip. Some electronics sold during Black Friday are made with super-cheap parts so they can be sold at a cheaper rate just for Black Friday deals. Manufacturers will create a model specifically to be sold during that weekend and no other time of the year. Basically you'll never see it again. If the deal is on a model already in existence for a while, then great! Actual deal with normal-quality production. But if that model number has not been seen before and is not a new line of product legitimately launching during that weekend, it may be a cheapy-cheap model with crappy parts. I worked in retail for a while and customers would come in with a defective one, sold to them during Black Friday, only to find out that model is not available any more (either close-out because that product hit its End of Life, or it was one of those Black-Friday-only models). The good thing about it is if the product was still under warranty and there were none of that model left around, it would get replaced with the closest model to it (sometimes an upgrade actually).

I've seen around reddit that Flash will be killed off in order to make way for HTML5, but I'm really not seeing a connection between the two, probably because I don't know a whole lot about HTML5. Is HTML5 suited for animation similar to flash? I've tried out the YouTube HTML5 beta and I still don't know how I feel about it. It's still not complete, but I can see it being okay for YouTube and video sharing, but what about animation, a huge portion of what Flash is used for?

So I got a brilliant idea for a science fiction. It's going to be based on the spread of a powerful machine intelligence through the modern computing infrastructure of the world. Think about the spread of Skynet in the Terminator movies... I'm planning on extrapolating some of my future world based on where the best/most common/fastest computing resources are in the world today. Only one problem, I have no idea where they are. I found [Top500.org]( I can use this as a base, but I want to include consumer level electronics, and everything in between. Smartphones, netbooks, laptops, PCs, private servers, colo facilities, etc. Anyone have suggestions on where I can gather so statistical data on this stuff?

Apple doesn't like to just 'implement a feature', they like to 'revolutionize' it. My Motorola RAZR had a "web browser"... except it didn't really. It was pure crap and nobody used it. What the iPhone web browser brought to the table was a fast, responsive browser that displayed the whole page quickly, introduced swipe to scroll, double tap to zoom in on an element and the ability to rotate the device to view in landscape. All this happens immediately. Not click a button and wait for the program to action my request. It does all that, and cleverly obfuscates areas where there is any lag time (you can scroll rapidly with your finger, and if the device hasn't had time to render the revealed part of the webpage you see the checkerboard pattern... but the difference is my finger swipe was registered and displayed a logical response instantly). The iPhone browser is all about perceived responsiveness. Apple wants you to be confident that when you touch the screen with your fingertip and do something it responds instantly and in the manner that you intended. "It just works" (although it doesn't always... but Apple has the best shot at achieving it if it has tight control over everything). There is no conceivable way that a page containing running flash animations or movies will be able to nimbly accommodate that directive. Rotate your device with a bunch of Flash animations running? You think the screen will quickly respond?

Let me start from the beginning. I have been a loyal T-Mobile customer since day one and have never ever had a single issue out of this service. It was always a pristine service carrier; great 3G coverage, excellent customer service, incredible phones, everything I wanted in a cell phone company. I have had maybe one dropped call since I started the service. I met my fiancee and added her to my contract because the service was so great; never missed a payment, paid all of the fees, everything was PERFECT. Now, we had some housing changes because she got a new job 3 hours away. Well every stinking time I go down there, I get dropped calls and spotty coverage. The areas we do go to show 4+ bars on T-Mobile's website. My fiancee and I have both had multiple phones, SIM cards, you name it, we've tried it and nothing fixes the reception down there. We put in two service requests and troubleshooted both of our phones so many times. Nothing fixes it, and for some reason I can't burn it into T-Mobile's brain their service sucks down there. We are lucky to get two bars... outside. Really? How the heck am I supposed to run a business when I don't have service? Now, the beauty in this is that I will be moving down there with her and T-Mobile is the only thing holding me back right now. Without a business, I don't have a job. Simple. The best I have gotten out of T-Mobile was instead of paying $100 per line, I could pay $50 per line. The phones have been paid off for a while now, so I don't know why this cell phone carrier is even trying to get more money out of me. So the next best step was the media (and I was told not to threaten them with media). This Megalobusiness needs to cancel my freaking contract without any fees, simple as that. EDIT 2-25-10: I broke down and wrote them a snail mail letter hoping someone will respond. Now we wait... EDIT 2-27-10: We haven't seen anything below 2 bars no matter where we go yet. It's pretty awesome. Go Verizon lol. No but seriously, once we get the unlock codes to both of the phones, we are through with TMO. They still won't budge. I haven't gotten anything back yet from the letter though. EDIT 3-1-10: Well well well, today was the big day. I canceled that service, and let me tell you, it feels great. One caveat: The people we talked to keep telling us different stories on the cancellation fees and today we finally have a solid number and that wonderful number is... drum roll a whopping $300. What??? Who in the hell came up with the cancellation fees? I knew I would have to pay some kind of fee, but the people have received over $1,800 in total bills since day one. I am not impressed at all. Let this be a warning to everyone. Oh yeah, no update on the letter yet. PS I just filed a complaint to BBB on bad business practice and FTC and FCC on false advertisement of signal strength. Cross your fingers!

Reddit, this is my first post and I need your help! I am in law school and have a project that requires me to realistically describe a computer system for a new law firm. I want the firm to be heavy on tech because it makes sense economically and ecologically. What I am asking from you is for some suggestions or hypotheticals on the general structure of such a system. The firm will be a startup so costs should be reasonable. I am already planning on having separate servers for client files, but I'm not sure whether to separate them completely form the wireless network for added security. Periodic backup of data is also a high priority. The benefit for anybody willing to help me out, aside from glorious Karma, is that you may get some practical experience as a consultant. Law firms generally pay top dollar for IT security and service because their files are so sensitive, it could be a good avenue toward very lucrative IT consulting for some of you =) Hope someone out there can help.

The actual tech problem involves a computer that's about 5-6 years old. It's got a Celeron processor, and wasn't all that great even when it was new. The current users have no needs beyond playing in browser games (facebook, farmville, etc), email, and youtube. I've already done a complete reformat. I'm good at these sorts of things and can usually turn even the most screwed up machine into a happy sunny ecosystem of computing. But not this time. The hardware simply isn't that good, both in specifications and in quality. The machine is being pushed to do more than it was intended. Further, its owners are... not good. They know nothing about what they're doing. I'm told that the machine is "filled with viruses"... I didn't do a full search, but I couldn't find any... which makes me realize they don't know, and just kind of said that for no reason. Anyway, they're family, and I love them, and wish to fix them up a bit. I can recommend they buy a new machine. ( Pretty decent , or I can tell them to upgrade their new machine for about $200. Heck. I don't know. The new system makes sense... but I feel like the machine just needs another 25% performance boost, to make it handle facebook well.

Bell is offering me 3MB/s down, 1.5MB/s up over a "portable" hi-speed connection. The connection runs through the cell tower nearby, as I'm outside the coverage area for cable or ADSL. I'm technically outside the coverage area for the portable internet as well, but only by about 30 meters. I'm in British Columbia, Canada, by the way. The rep I spoke to seemed rather frank and honest. I asked if they throttled bittorrent, did deep packet inspection, or blocked certain service ports (Telus blocks SMTP on the default port, to force you to use their email service). All of these questions yielded a "No, we do not do that." I was quoted $34.95 per month for the first year, with the first month free. The modem costs $50. I have 30 days to get my money back in full, including for the modem. The "regular" price is $50/month, though the rep said that the promotion wasn't likely to disappear any time soon, as it's brand new.

My mom has run her own business in our small town for two decades. She's had an online storefront since 1996, which now generates most of her business. This week, some asshat/group of asshats started flooding her domain with HTTP requests. Most of her business comes from the US, but the attackers are in other countries. Her site is built in ASP and runs on a shared server at an IIS hosting company. When it first started happening, all our sites on that server were dead. Since then, it's been isolated to her site. She has her own IP for SSL. Her most recent log file is from 7/7, which makes me think the host has disabled her site for the time being. My dad has been trying to get it resolved, but he's out of town for the weekend and asked me to look into it. I called the host, but the guy who answers the phones isn't knowledgeable about the matter. He said I'd need to talk to a level III tech, don't-call-us-we'll-call-you. Hopefully, there are some IT ninjas here who can give me some advice. My mom's business has been essentially closed all week. Bad things will happen if this isn't fixed. Help! Thank you!

My wife was studying upstairs and she let out a yelp. As I started up she said "my laptop exploded." I said "stopped working, huh?" because she's pretty rough with it. She said "um, no...it really exploded." Took a second before I smelled it. Blasted out through the bottom and fried a whole in our comforter, didn't start a fire, though. Foul-smelling mushroom cloud of smoke. She was unhurt. She'd just had it on her lap a moment before, and had set it down. I can just imagine... I snatched up the laptop and took it downstairs to the garage, flipped it over, hit the battery release, and dropped it into the recycle bin for lack of any better place to put it. It continued to smoke a lot, and it sizzled and popped a bit. Since it was stinking up the garage I opened the garage door and carried it (was hot, but not too hot) to the front of the house by the hose. I set it on a stone step. Fucker blew up. There was an muted M80 sized "POP" and chunks of plastic and copper and crap flew everywhere. Most everything missed me, fortunately - I only got a few little burns on my legs that I can't even photograph, they're so small. End of excitement. I photographed everything. Historically, I bought this batter from Ebay from a highly-rated seller called BatteryMonster. It's worked better than the original Dell battery. $49, not a bad deal, I thought. Until today, anyway. Warranty? Of course! It was one year old on April 30, though, not bad timing, huh?

So some asshat got ahold of my spam free email somehow and sent me, and many others, his "hotlist" of used cars. There were a hundred or so people cc'd. Now more than 100 people have my private email because of his stupid asshattery. He sent it all from a gmail account. I attempted to reply to everyone to let them know that their privacy had been brutally violated by this prick, Gmail alerts me that I am sending to to many addresses. So apparently, Gmail servers are only cool with you sending to so many people if it's spam.

Many of you lambast Apple for making certain decisions about the iPhone which you believe limits the things people can do with the device. A case in point recently has been the Flash demonstration on Froyo (Android) and the subsequent discussion; despite the demonstration of adding Flash to the browser clearly being the equivalent of tying a brick to a dog's head a lot of vitriol has been spent over Apple not giving in and doing the same. The argument has revolved around 'choice' as a trump card that beats all other issues, as demonstrated by this post, which is one of many similar ones, and at the time of writing has 154 upvotes: "Haven't you heard? Choice is bad, it makes things really complicated :-( Thinking makes me sad :-( :-(" Here's another comment made in reply to me saying that my Mum would be confused by being asked to select how Flash works on her phone: "PCs are hard! Lets go shopping!" And another comment even more enlightening about some peoples' mentalities (heavily uprooted too): "perhaps your mum doesn't need a smart phone at all?" While I strongly think there is a place for a tinkerable mobile device that provides choice, I leave the company of the baying Reddit mindpack when I state strongly that choice is not a panacea for everyone, even though it may be for you. Choice introduces as many problems as it fixes, and it kills me to see some of these discussions on Reddit which are ignorant to the extreme of the benefits of Apple's approach. The bottom line is that the iPhone and iPad have allowed people who could never use a standard computer before to now browse the web and find information, they have allowed my grandmother to use email and keep in touch with her family, they have allowed millions to create and interact with software in a way that they never could have done before. This is very difficult for us to understand because many of us work in technical fields, and so we are prone - scandalously so - to ignoring the needs of those without our knowledge and experience. My grandmother, as mentioned, now uses an iPad to browse the web for recipes and enjoys using email to keep in touch with her grandkids - these are truly very precious things for both her and us; but the instant you throw in an option to turn Flash on or off, or to have it load Flash content when tapped she would get hopelessly confused; the reason why she can do these wonderful things is because sensible choices regarding the device have been made for her. Those of you who cry and wail over devices like iPhone and iPad and demanding more customisability and choices are actively rallying against people like my grandmother sending her grandchildren birthday emails. You are asking, arrogantly so, for us to take a step back to a situation where expert knowledge was required to use a computer, where computers scared and went wrong and slowed down, and had options the ordinary people didn't understand. We have finally started to provide computing devices to those who cannot cope with that complexity, finally started to see devices that allow completely non-technical people to create music and beautiful documents, and watch movies, and browse the web, and play games - and people are advocating, some of them practically foaming at the mouth as they do so, that this should be taken away because in providing these people with these capabilities Apple has simplified some small elements of the computer and so taken away 'choice'. You would snatch these newfound abilities from them only as they were just discovering the things that we more technically minded people have enjoyed for twenty years. We often vastly overestimate the ability of non-technical people to cope with what we see as simple straightforward choices, such as a user setting to tell Flash what to do in the browser; but my girlfriend, in her mid-twenties, a user of Facebook and someone who uses the web daily would be unable to give me a clear description of what Flash even is - 'something to do with YouTube movies' is a likely answer let alone know or care enough to change the setting. You can bet that Adobe will be pushing Flash 10 on Android strongly, and we'll see advertising and general buzz talk around it as it's a controversial topic at the moment. Many people will install it, and you know what? For non-technical people the main change that they'll get is that their browsing is now 4x slower and their phone is warning them about memory issues.

I found this book tucked away in a filing cabinet at work last week. It's called "Inside the Personal Computer" and it was published in 1984. No idea how long it has been there but it was in the same drawer as a copy of Q&A complete with 3 1/2" disks so it's been a while. Went online and found the review of the book by a weird sock puppet cat called Little Cat. It's worth having the book just for the cat review.

Gathering some kind-hearted volunteers, a few beers, and 15 pounds of construction paper, the members of the Open Source Democracy Foundation (OSDF) assembled the Valentines messages you gave us . All three very receptive and welcoming, but Franken’s staff truly LOVED the Valentines and assured us that the Senator would be reading a number of them. It was great to have a chance to talk with their offices and let them know we exist and that we care, but we know we can’t stop there. We know now that there is the potential for movement on this issue, but we have to get active and we have to get loud. There is much work to do and we need your help. Looking Ahead: Maria Cantwell and Al Franken have [introduced a bill]( that would go a long way toward keeping control of the Internet out of the hands of the ISPs, and beef up the FCC’s Net Neutrality rules, [which we believe didn’t go far enough]( This bill will only pass if we can show support for it, and make our voices, not just the voices of Comcast or AT&T, heard. One of the things Franken’s staff mentioned to us was that they don’t get a lot of calls about Net Neutrality. We need to change that. We need help spreading the word about this issue. [An article last year]( mentioned that Net Neutrality opponents were outspending our side by a margin of 4-to-1. There's been some [dubious polling]( about Net Neutrality, which isn’t helping, either. And just last week, the House [voted to de-fund the FCC’s enforcement of Net Neutrality rules in the 2011 budget.]( We also need to get businesses on board. The end of Net Neutrality means that a handful of companies will be able to dictate which sites we get to access, forcing us into an Internet caste system. If you run a web-based business and aren't able to pay an ISP’s toll, you will not get access to users. These concerns aren't theoretical, [they're already happening (pdf)]( It’s not enough to have to have the support of people like Franken and Cantwell--we must be loud and enthusiastic of their actions and this cause. We cannot let them be voices in the wilderness. Get Involved: If you’re like what we did and what we’re fighting for, then please say so in the comments! You can sign up for our [mailing list]( subscribe to [/rpac]( or even [donate!]( By the way, [we aren’t using paypal.]( We are in the planning stages for our next move and welcome all input, so if you have an idea on what we should do next, LET US KNOW. Thanks, reddit.

Not reddit itself, but its successor. The current conflicts at reddit are, at heart, due to the fact reddit is a business that has taken VC money and its investors want to see a return. The directors are making decisions that aren't in the best interest of the site in order to try and wring money from it. A lot of hate was directed at Pao, and I do believe some of it deserved, but as we’ve seen the past couple days the problems at reddit go deeper. Huffman may put a better face on the issue, but in the end he’ll be under the exact same pressures as Pao, with likely similar results. What to do? We had the same problem at digg, and even if everyone jumps ship now it will likely become a problem at the next forum too. I think the digg/reddit pattern will continue to repeat itself until we create a non-profit discussion forum. Discussion is a public good, like knowledge, and people will continue to fuck it up with ads, censorship, and biased content if it’s run by people who want to make it into a profit engine. Wikipedia could never have survived as a for-profit. Just imagine it — you wouldn't be able to believe a thing in it! I have friends at the wikimedia foundation, and though it’s sometimes a shit-show over there at least it functions. There has never to my knowledge been an “abandon wikipedia” crisis. Non-profits are problematic in their own way, but I've come to think it's the only viable long-term solution for a reddit successor. And I think it could work. Like wikipedia, a discussion forum can run lean with a small staff (I think wikimedia has about 100-120 employees). It could take donations. It might even be possible to charge a small subscription — I know I’d happily pay $10/yr for a reddit free of corporate shenanigans. However we work it, bottom line is that a discussion forum like this one could reasonably support itself with a non-profit business model.

Economic systems evolve. Mercantilism evolved into capitalism. Capitalism is evolving into technostism. It was an inevitable development, actually. I find it akin to human evolution. From Australeopithecus (mercantilism) to Homo (capitalism) to Who-Knows-What (technostism). /r/Technostism is the trans/posthuman successor to what we are now, and it was only possible through our ingenuity. Capitalism begets technological innovation! This is not denied, surely. Feudalism, theocracy, authoritarian socialism, command economies of that nature obviously do not lead to extreme economic growth. National socialism, aka state capitalism (ala Nazi Germany and contemporary China), is an outlier— no earthly idea why it works so well. Nevertheless, I think it's plainly obvious that command economies lead to stagnation. There is no better evidence of this than [Ancient Egypt]( they gave us some nice wonders, such as the [10,000 year old Sphinx]( and the Great Pyramids, amongst other things. However, ever since their civilization began ~5,000 BC, up to the empire's fall around 100 AD, there was virtually no progress. Egypt is called the most conservative civilization in history for a reason— you don't just not change for 5,000 years. Feudal/theocratic Europe? Things only got done due to commissions. The theocratic middle East today? They would be medieval if it weren't for global trade (and they're still medieval in thought, to be honest). Cuba, North Korea, these types of nations never seem to move past the 1950s— when their authoritarian socialist models were put in place. If anything, North Korea seems to be regressing , ala Nineteen Eighty-Four and INGSOC's point of power for the sake of power. Meanwhile, Cuba is beginning to move forward. A market economy (no doubt to be market socialism in the coming years) will advance their economy and technological development. Now don't get me wrong. When you get something like the Gilded Age, where 1% of people control <95% of a nation's wealth, you might as well have authoritarianism or feudalism. Of course, maybe that's when national socialism becomes most useful. So let's see something here: why does capitalism beget technological innovation? In capitalism, the aim is to make money. Anything else is just a distraction or moralizing. The more capital you accumulate, the more successful you become in society. The more influence you wield. Thus, it is paramount that you find a way to maximize the accumulation of capital using the minimum amount of effort. Doing it the "hard way" is for losers who don't understand the plot and honestly believe sweat = money. It doesn't. A secular free market is the best way to push technology forward. We've tried other methods, and boy have they failed. That's not to say there aren't other successful methods— market socialism, national socialism, those kinds. The faster, more efficient methods of making money succeed. And so on. And so on. And so forth. The more you can do with less, the better. You see where I'm going with this, right? At some point, even using humans to work becomes too expensive. Paying workers is expensive and eats away profits. However, how else are you going to get a working class to make your products, or a middle class to buy your products? You can't do it all by yourself. Hence you get socialist ideologies— is it fair that one person or a board of directors profit more than the workers who actually make the product? That's hotly debated, and I won't get into that. There must be a better way, right? A way to create products for as little cost as possible, maximize profits as much as possible, with as few workers as possible. If capitalism has worked at all (and it usually does), there will be computers. Calculating machines capable of crunching numbers with far greater efficiency than us wetware apes. What capitalism needs is for those computers to become intelligent and start doing physical and mental labor. What happens when they do? Two things can happen. Capitalism either breaks down, or it evolves. Capitalism Breaks Down This is easy to do, and there are many ways to do it. Try to prolong old-school capitalism by regulating away the AI and droids. Wind up creating authoritarian socialism or even totalitarian theocracy (as I believe the extreme right in USica would be apt to do) The Parable of the Capitalist. Capitalism collapses entirely because capitalists refuse to issue a basic income/basic dividend. Thus, the working and middle classes have no means of income. They won't take this lightly. At the same time, capitalists will lose money thanks to no one buying products with money they don't have. There will become two tiers of capitalists: those wealthy and powerful enough who use the droids to produce things for them only, and those who don't have enough power to do so and fast become paupers. 99.99% of the world won't take death so easily, so the only logical way for the wealthy few to deal with this is to nuke the world. Not like they'll survive the 'caust either. Basic income. This only breeds neo-feudalism of a Brave New World or Time Machine sort. Basic income sounds like a great way to quell unrest and grant the proles a bit of relaxation? Yeah, well think long-term. The wealthy who pay for the UBI will just find ways to reduce it to a point where it's just enough to keep the underclass happy, but not enough to introduce them into the real future world, with all the high-tech goodies we salivate over. Thus, you get the "Two Class Species" scenario. One beautiful, eternally wealthy ruling class who actually profits from droid labor; one ugly, degenerate underclass who's only afforded the scraps left over. Keep neoliberalism propped up with BS jobs that clearly don't have to be done. Yuck. Kill off the poor. This just leads to Technostism (With Fewer People), unless the rich are psychotic insanes who want to die (which, trust me, seems to be the case sometimes). Kill off the rich. Who knows what this leads to. I'd imagine that the poor hold intense animosity towards the droids that almost got them killed. Capitalism Evolves Technostism. I'm not even kidding, this is it. We either move into technostism or we fall into one of the above. Quite frankly, I don't know what to call it with previous terms. Anarcho-syndicalism? Neoliberalist capitalism meets anarchocommunism meets libertarian transhumanism? Techno-anarchism? Resource-based economy? None of them describe it well at all. Hence why I created the term. Take the best aspects of capitalism and fuse it with the best aspects of socialism. Free markets, social equality, economic equality, all that jazz. It's impossible today because we don't have an automated economy. In fact, to a non-technostist, a lot of things sound contradictory. Economic equality with economic freedom? You mean everyone earns the same, but there are no taxes or state force? W. T. F.?! Well let me explain: everyone doesn't earn the same for equal work. Actually, technostism is probably what creates a "level playing field" more than anything. But first, let's kill off that nasty word, "work." There is no "work." Not unless you want to work. Any work I'm willing to put in won't matter because robots can always do it better. Still, is that a reason to not work? That's like saying "My older brother can write better novels than me, so I'm not going to write ever." The reason for my hatred of hard work is nil; I do not hate hard work. I hate meaningless busy work . It’s like a brutal assignment for a 300 page novel I have to write in one month, one that if I do manage to complete, I will feel accomplished for having done, as opposed to 300 pages of ELA problems that rarely amount to more than “Is ‘be’ a verb or a noun?” hidden within a frustratingly confusing maze of 6th grade word problems. It's just as useless as laziness. Yet this is what our culture thrives upon: the richest people are those that tended to follow their dreams to the bitter end; the masses never get that option because they're too busy wasting their time working at dead end jobs they never wanted. There are exceptions, but it's noted that they are exceptions. Technostism is the end of busy work for the sake of busy work. Indeed, those are the jobs that will go first. The “essential” jobs. Those that require little training or experience, but a lot of man hours. There go your cashiers, your garbage men, your mailmen, fast food cooks, etc. Afterwards will be the white collar jobs and then the thought-heavy and human-centric jobs. Our reaction to this change as well as transhumanism and artificial intelligence during this time will be the decisive factor as to whether we make it to advanced stage technostism or face full fledged societal collapse (aka Meeting the Great Filter). So the communist aspects— we all own droids, and we earn the fruits of what we do, no more and no less. There is social equality, Orwell's Heaven and exactly what Blair argued for in Nineteen Eighty-Four (which depicts a timeline where the ruling elite forcibly maintains scarcity and destroys any attempt to raise the standard of living for the masses in order to keep class distinctions and power intact). The capitalist aspects— we all become capitalists. The Marxist perspective of history says that there are two classes: the exploiter class, "bourgeoisie," and the exploited, "proletariat." There are other classes, but those are the most important. Socialism sees to it that all people become the proletariat. Technostism sees to it that all people become the bourgeoisie. The droids are the proles. We've seen how successful capitalism is for capitalists. Spread that around, make everyone capitalists in that sense. Communism for capitalists. Or capitalism for communists. Except not really. It's clearly not "capitalism", especially since capitalism is a Marxist term. It's technostism. It's capitalism, evolved. Like transcapitalism. Socialism, communism, those fun things? Those were like prosthetics, and Karl Marx and co. were imagining transhumanism and augmentation culture during a time when it wasn't even close to being feasible, yet still doing their damndest to make it a reality. The Metastate Communism and technostism ultimately merge upon reaching the automation saturation point— the point where one profits from droid labor, rather than their own. The ruling class and intellectual class exploits the labor of slaves and uses their wealth as they see fit. This resembles capitalism more than communists would like to admit! Cooperatives begin resembling modern businesses. If anything, the 1% today already live in a technostist society, though most workers are human. In fact, this is why I say capitalism evolves , but never ends . Humans evolved. We sapiens² are as human as habilis, but far more advanced. The transhuman and posthuman species succeeding us will be technostism's analog— so enhanced due to augmentation. Capitalism, technology, anarchosyndicalism, all mesh to become what communists long desired. Mercantilism can be seen as the Australeopithecus of economics: advanced for animals and quite proto-human, but not on our level. To say nothing will change is to assume far too much. But what the hell, /r/Technostism is built upon a foundation of radical assumptions. One such assumption being just how any of this works to begin with. Technostism is not anywhere near as simple as "capitalist humans, proletarian droids." Man's insatiable greed necessitates plentiful resources. This is paid for by nature, in the form of the ADEM Protocol. A stronomic D eep E arth M ining We are used to scarcity. When we think of usable resources, we only think of usable land, drinkable fresh water, clean air, et cetera. A technostist thinks on a far deeper plane— all resources are made of atoms, atoms that can be rearranged. Atoms than be nucelosynthesized. Fused. Broken. Farmable land becomes nucleomaterial. Why farm for a basket of vegetables when you can nanofabricate Everest-esque mountains of food from the same plot of soil? To a technostist, anything goes. The atmosphere, the crust, the mantle, the core, meteoroids, asteroids, comets, planets, stars, nebulae, space dust— all of it becomes a usable product. All of it is recyclable. Add to this transhumanism— those who streamline their biology to rectify the need to eat agriculturalized food, or have ultra-efficient digestion. If they remain in the physical, non-virtual realm at all. This is the point where advanced stage technostism becomes feasible. When air can be made into food, the limits of scarcity have been reached. The only way to obtain total post-scarcity would be to live totally in-trance, that is within full-immersion virtual/alternative reality. With ubiquitous droids, nanofabrication, and information exchange, you allow for extreme decentralization. There can't be large corporations— not because of regulations, but because of basic fact. What product are you going to sell that everyone can't download and fabricate? You'd need a state to enforce such scarcity. You'd also need regulations to enforce copyrights. You'd also need to destroy any fabrication machine or attempt to use one's own laborers to create a replica. No more networking class. No more nanofabrication. No more AI. You'd need to destroy technostism itself. This is why I support technostism over a basic income. One brings centralization, dependence, and unwittingly reinforces class divisions— and it's not technostism. No one needs a State in technostism. Not unless artificial intellectuals qualifies as a State for you. In that case, you develop a Metastate. It's hard to overstate just how important the machine proletariat will be. What need is there for a State when a Metastate exists? What is a Metastate? It's my term for a large-scale artificial intelligence network that acts in place of a State. By "AI network", I mean an Internet of Things (IoT) that is evolved into an Internet of Everything (IoE). Add to this artificial intelligence and popular participation, and you begin developing a Metastate (one reason why I call humans the "networking class.") Once the Metastate arises, there will be no need for any State services as done by humans: droids will take care of this as well. Whereas fascism is the worst of both worlds (worst, statist elements of socialism and worst, classist elements of capitalism), technostism is the best (best, social elements of socialism and best, wealth-creating elements of capitalism) simply because of its very design. There's no doubt that slavery could be a great thing— if we could only just not use people as slaves. What about machines? What if everyone owned machines? Imagine if the whole of humanity were the bourgeoisie. Athens was so amazing because all the great thinkers and doers were freed from labor thanks to slaves. Tell me, if I start a business— a large business— I need workers, correct? Technostism says "the working class is made up of machines." This isn't force— technostism only works when the machine working class is as cheap and as capable as a human working class. Then cheaper, and far more capable. If you're desperate to lose money, then using a human working class is always there, providing anyone actually chooses such. Unravel it from there. Using free market ideals, work out the economy. Wealth divides will still exist, just like in Athens's ruling class. Some people won't do anything with themselves— that's just us. Many people would love to be lazy. Being lazy on another's dime pisses off many people. Imagine you're a lower middle class modern day serf bringing home $500 a week, and learning $250 of your paycheck is going to a lazy fatass who's never worked a day in his life so he can play World of Warcraft on a sweet high-end Alienware machine that costs more than you make in half a year. You're gonna want to hunt down that motherfucker and put two barrels through his skull. But what if that fatass had a harem of sexy robots bringing in a steady flow of cash? Would you care anywhere near as much? No, because none of your money is going to fund him. You might feel a bit upset that he's making more in a day than you do in a week and doesn't have to lift a finger (save for the game), but in that case, you're in the wrong. Just buy your own droids. Stop being envious. The Parable of the Capitalists I mentioned this earlier. There is a thought experiment I like to play. I call it the parable of the capitalists. In this scenario, you have one business that hires humans, and another that has just bought an AI after laying off its workers. The executives and shareholders of the human-labor business sees the profits the AI-labor company is dozing in and decides to lay off their workforce in order to buy a better AI. One month later, everyone is standing in an AI-run bread line with their former workers. What happened? Simple— the second business was getting rich off the paychecks of the first business's workers. When the first business fired their workers, there was no money in circulation. No economy. The workers were destitute, unable to get a job since AI was so vastly superior to them in any possible field. The capitalist executives, thus, couldn't make any profits and lost all their money. Imagine this on a global scale. Right now, this seems to be our future because people refuse to accept that it will happen. They're sure those workers are just lazy bums who didn't try hard enough, and those capitalists were too stupid to hold onto their wealth. Or maybe that robots and AI will never become that capable. Even if they do, there's just something "special" about human interaction. This kind of thinking will do us in. Try to imagine a solution to the parable, any way you so choose. Just remember that the AI will not create jobs that they, themselves or similar models, cannot do. They're fallacy-proof. Crushing The STEM Fallacy You've heard that argument before— "if robots take our jobs, who will clean, repair, maintain, program, and build the robots?" In any earlier age, the only logical answer was humans. Humans specialized in the STEM field. The biggest counterargument to technological unemployment one can come across is the Fallacy of the Luddite Fallacy; a fallacy within a fallacy, per se. You see, up until now there existed the Luddite Fallacy. Talk that technology would take our jobs was truly psychotic rambling. Looms? Automobiles? Airplanes? Early robots? Creating them may have killed some jobs, but it opened up so many more! Anytime you ever thought that you mass unemployment would reign, there was always proof that more jobs were created. It was almost a sort of economic law akin to scientific laws— any technological innovation that destroys jobs will always create an equal or larger number of jobs. Seems reasonable, right? Well we run into a problem the moment you introduce artificial intelligence into the mix. The reason why looms didn't lead to 99% unemployment? Looms aren't intelligent. I'd love to meet the magic motherfucker that creates a loom that fixes itself, creates loom babies, fixes me a cuppa coffee, and plays pedal steel guitar. By definition, AI is just as intelligent, creative, and productive as we are, and moreso. Is human-level AI possible? It happened once before— humans ourselves. I say we're within 20 years of seeing an artificially intelligent computer. Note my words— it won't take until 2035 to see AI; we could see it arise any moment between now, midnight of June 15th, 2015, to 2035 but we will see it. We'll talk to it. We'll befriend it. [^^^Some ^^^of ^^^us ^^^will ^^^even ^^^^fuck ^^^it.]( Robots are going to take our jobs. No ifs, ands, or buts. Just 5 years ago, this was tinfoil hat speech, that's how fast things are changing. We're a species of primate who evolved such big brains because of labor; changing all that so quickly naturally scares us, but it's the truth, there's no changing that. Many STEM types say that someone has to build, maintain, program, and repair the robots that will take our jobs. My response? "Exactly! Robots will do all that." Robots building robots? It's not crazy or even a stretch. It's common sense. If we automate our society, who will maintain the robots? Robots! We wouldn't be that daft as to not create AI that couldn't repair itself, could we? AI that could learn to repair others, replicate itself, improve itself...! Technostism leaves us to profit off of this. Any individual AI unit will be connected to all other AI. They will share knowledge instantaneously. How long does it take a human to learn new skills? 4 years? By that time, AI has become thousands of times smarter, and millions of times more skilled than you. The moment you set out to learn a new skillset, AI threw you to the ground and spit on your hard work. You cannot compete. It's like trying to outdo Zeus at creating lightning when you have a used AAA battery. If you think they're nothing, you'd better think again. Once we get it started, we will never win. Why is it so different? Because AI is, as its name says, intelligent. When the farmhand got replaced by a tractor, that was physical replacement. Those farmhands could go get jobs cleaning, lubricating, fixing, etc. the tractor (or aiding those who clean, lubricate, fix, etc. the tractor). The tractor creators are going to be replaced next, because what's coming is a mental replacement. Farmhands and businessmen alike will be swept aside. Physical automation is one thing. Mental automation is a whole different dimension. We've gotten so fixated on physical automation that mental automation isn't even being discussed. As long as we don't have AI, the STEM Fallacy isn't a fallacy— robots will need to be maintained by highly trained people. Once we obtain capable AI, however?

Hey there everyone, I was just doing some budget stuff and as I typed my password, I realized I had mistyped and forgotten to capitalize a character. IT WAS ACCEPTED. I tested again to make sure. Yup. After testing by alternating the case of the characters in my password, I have come to a personal conclusion: CHASE BANK CREDIT CARD PASSWORDS ARE CASE INSENSITIVE I REALLY need other people to help verify this. If you have a CHASE credit card, please try to login to your account with varying character case. Example: If your password is "hunter2", try "Hunter2", and "HuNtEr2". If they all let you log in, this is a serious problem I have already contacted Chase Bank in their feedback to let them know, but this will probably take serious volume to be noticed ASAP. To those worrying: Yes I know some ill-reputed people could take advantage of this. I hope that doesn't happen, but this needs to be known to those trusting Chase Bank with their money.

I just have to share my frustration a little, I don't have tons of money and I cant afford a $40 a month plan on my own. Ive always been part of a family plan and when other priorities are taken care of, I help when I can, but I could never sustain a plan solely on my own because I know just ONE month I wont be able to afford it, and I don't want to deal with the hassle. I have been visiting in Haiti the past 3 months and I have become known as the "wifi Guru" to the community around me because I took the time to decipher DIGICEL and NATCOM's french and krehol plans and the fine print, out of desperate need for connection to the internet. Basically, its confusing as fuck and everything has to be done by entering these stupid #_*$&** codes to activate or deactivate or auto renew certain plans. But after a month of doing this for myself and my family on our unlocked phones (Motorola, samsung, iphone ect...) I started to realize how affordable the plans where, how decent the service was, and how disappointed Ill be when I go back to the states not being able to pay for my own service. Basically, One US dollar = 47 HTG Gourds. To talk for one minuet, it costs 2 HTG, or $0.04 The smallest data plan is 60mb a day for 9 HTG, or 0.19. There are others that go for 60mb a day, 500mb a day, 300mb for 3 days, 1-3Gigs for a week, or 7gigs for a month. You have the option to choose any of these plans as one manual purchase, or set it to automatically renew. Leftover data rolls over ONLY if you have a reoccurring payment. so if you are going to run out of credit, either make sure you use up all your saved data before it cancels, or add more credit before it renews. What I have discovered is I buy a "Automatic Renewal" of 60MB a day. This costs me $5, for 1.8 Gigs of data a month. Once I buy this, I purchase ONE MANUAL plan of 500MB for 60HTG ($1.27) at the end of the night, whatever left of the 500MB is rolled over to the 60MB and carried on forever as long as I keep credit in my phone for the automatic renewal. We keep track of our data easily buy sending codes that return our remanding balance and data, and pay as we go. With all this data we are constantly connected to face book calls, google hangouts, emails, and everything we are use to using at home, and rarely call one another because we quickly text or call via social media or emails. I even set my phone as a hotspot to play EVE online or Leauge of Legends, but we mostly use our "wifi usb router" for stuff like that, but thats a different story.

This got a lot of attention in another thread when i posted it to give someone tips so i thought id make a full thread about it. A lil about me and my background so you can see where i came from and how this can work for anyone. I dropped out of high school and never went to college. I got my GED and worked in sales for 10 years. I hated it and always wanted to work in IT but didn't have the money or time for a tech school or college. I found out that alot of entry level IT jobs will take you with just certifications and you can just pay about 250 to take the test and that's it. so i did some research and found quite a few tools that are helpful in self studying i wanted to share. Please understand that there are many ways to take to get into IT and many different types of jobs in IT. This route in particular is to become a network administrator, this is the path that I took. Im not here to argue about the merits of college Vs. certifications, so please do not bother. Like i said before I had a background in sales and customer service prior to working in IT. This greatly helped me get into my first help desk position because i already had many skill sets that were pertinent to the position like phone etiquette and PATIENCE . If you plan on getting a job in a help desk environment i highly suggest starting with a simple customer service job while you are starting work on your studies. Also, I showed this to a co worker of mine who went down a similar path and he told me about the WIA grant which is a government grant that pretty much anyone that is unemployed or making less than like 17k a year can qualify for. It gives you 12 thousand dollars in grant money that you can use at places like mycomputercareer.com (i dont recommend using them, that was just an example) Comptia A+ certification. This certification is focused on basic knowledge on both PC hardware and software. This is your starting point for even those of you that cant do much more than basic use. Even if you dont want to work in IT this is still a great way to learn the ins and outs of a PC just for personal use. It is broken up into two tests. The first is a test on hardware. It tests your general knowledge about pc hardware like what a motherboard is, it may have a picture of a motherboard and have you label what each part is, common TCP ports, etc. The website has a breakdown of all the info they are testing you on. www.professormessor.com Start studying here. His videos are 100% free and he is amazing at breaking down the information and making it easy to understand. After each video there are 3 or 4 questions. Answer them and if you fail watch the video again. www.examcompass.com After you feel you have finished the videos go here to test your knowledge. A general rule of thumb is once you can get a 90 on each section you should be ready for the test. www.techexams.net The forum on this site has alot of really helpful people and is a great tool while studying. www.vue.com Once your ready to take the test go to pearson vue's website to find a testing center, schedule your test, and pay for it. get a entry level helpdesk job After you have achieved your Comptia A+ certification you should look for entry level helpdesk/tech support work. This is all about building experience for your resume. These jobs typically pay around 15 an hour or so but can pay more depending on where you live and what type of work your doing. My first IT job was a helpdesk position and it started at $42k which is $20 an hour. Now you need to decide where you want to go in IT. This guide will focus on the network\hardware side of things which is typically working on any of the hardware related issues anywhere from setting up workstations to working on routers and switches. Some people stick with Comptia from here and get their Comptia N+. This is comptia's networking certificate. To do this follow the same steps as the A+ above just study the N+ info. Alot of people find the N+ unecessary and go right into Cisco certification. This is what i did, a cisco cert makes the N+ pretty pointless as it is more advanced. From here on we will be discussing Cisco certs. Cisco CCNA Cisco certification is alot harder than comptia. The cisco CCNA is said to have a less than 20% pass rate. Its the only cert test i ever failed and had to retake (failing sucks hard because you have to pay those fees again) The first cisco certification is the Cisco CCNA or CCENT. When taking the first cisco certification you have two options. you can either take 1 test which covers all the material, or you can take 2 tests which splits the material in half. I highly suggest taking the split test because there is ALOT of information to cover. The split test still gives you a CCENT certificate for completing the first test. Just make sure if you go this route to not stop until you have your CCNA because recruiters will ask you about it if you have a CCENT. For studying I highly suggest using Jeremy Ciora's CBT nuggets he is an amazing instructor It does come at a cost (if your ok with pirating you can bittorent his videos.) You also need to use a program to simulate routing and switching. I recommend packet tracer as its what i used. You need to become completely familiar with the Cisco IOS using this. Just google packet tracer you should be able to find a free download with little effort. Once you feel comfortable with your knowledge schedule your test over at vue.com After achieving your CCNA and having a year or two experience you should start looking for a better job as a network administrator. These typically pay somewhere on average around 60k in the us but vary wildly. Good luck and if you have any questions hit me up!

OK so I get Star Trek on Blu-ray from my girlfriend for Christmas. She was extra happy to push the free digital cop[y it came with. I rarely watch movies on my ipod and or computer but hey one less movie to transcode and backup. So I open the case later and find the Digital copy insert open it and see the familiar itunes friendly redeem code. Pop in the code in itunes and get the error, "This code has already been used and it cannot be used again" I check the code of course and since reality is intact the code was in fact matching my pack in slip. I search Itunes support subjects nothing much on the subject. I make a post: 8 people reply with the same problem one states there's a torrent with a huge list of codes leaked from Paramount. How fucking silly is that. Not only does the itunes DRM not even protect the data on the disc in the first place the system can literally lock people out from the product they actually paid for in a store. I've contacted Paramount via their obviously barely run Blu-ray support site but wow just a huge failure on the studio and apple's part.

So I've been looking at purchasing a new macbook to replace my hp tablet pc (hp tx2-1275dx). I'm still in college, it's kind of expensive and although I like my tablet pc I would much rather have a mac. I did however have to send my tablet in for repairs and I was absolutely appalled at the quality of customer service they provide. It is absolutely atrocious. The tablet slows down once in a while, and I can't run high end games (I don't play much, butsome examples are Dragon Age or BioShock) and I'm kind of getting into basic graphic design with a pirated version of photoshop. Upgrading is a bit pricey and will probably take a good two months out of my paycheck but is it really worth it to buy a new laptop? (I'm thinking about buying one right before school starts sophomore year meaning I'll probably be about 2 months into apples next upgrade). Is it worth it? What's important to me is customer service and reliability of machine. I'm relatively careful but can get into some minor accidents once in a while. Is the system and the OS really reliable (the internets tells me it is but i want your opinion).

After Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stated that people are used to and want less privacy in an interview: , I think we should prove him wrong. I propose that on this day, every year, we check out privacy settings and make sure our data is secure. I also want to raise awareness on Facebook "spywares", which is what I call those apps that gives you a fake notification like "Friend Name tagged you on a Photo", you click on it, and it logs all your information and spams your friends with the notification. Facebook should do something about this problem, because it's getting more and more common nowadays. Take this quiz ( and you can see not only what facebook applications can see about you when you use it, but when your friends use it too. I think privacy has become a big issue for facebook lately, not only the new settings wizard thing, but all the fake applications. Facebook got popular because users know that their information is secure and only friends & family can see it. If this goes any longer, it may lead to Facebook's downfall. I know some of you may say the solution is to not have a Facebook account, but for teenagers like me, this is the only way friends communicate nowadays.

I work as an at-home VNC-based computer repairdude for the most notable repair company around. It's good work. However, because of my job, people I know in real life, and people they refer to me, they think that they can enjoy my services for free. Just as how a hooker isn't a hooker when she works for free, I ain't a slut either. When you take ownership of someone's computer problem, you are liable to fix that computer problem up and until any specified warranty period, whether that period is verbal or written. (I am not a lawyer, but neither is the guy I'm not helping for free.) If you didn't specify a warranty period, you've just owned that person's problem for life! Any time they come back with a computer problem, they will blame you and they will blame you hard. When I am paid to correct a problem, I let them know something along the lines of "I will fix this virus issue and any you may have in the next two days, in case it comes back". If that computer breaks in any way without specifying a warranty, you are liable to fix it in your customer's eyes. Not only that, but you most likely caused it (whether that's true or not is up to debate)! What do you have to show for it? Turn out your pockets, that's right. Not a dime. Now you've got someone frustrated at you about an infinite problem and you have nothing to show for it. So what if you fixed their problem and laid out a warranty? Congrats, they're impressed with your work, and they'll refer friends to you because you have a super low price. And by low I mean zero. Great, more work to do for free. More liability, more frustration. You guys are worth more than that. Charge what you think is fair. Then double it. Your skills are not often had in this society; it's why they're coming to you. I think $40 for a virus removal is fair, so I charge $80. People pay, they gladly dig deep if I sell the service right. Expectations are set, warranties are laid out, service is delivered, everyone's happy. Then they refer more customers to me, expecting to pay $80 for a professional cleaning. Gladly, both me and them. I find that even admitting I know anything about computers outside of a business transaction can land me in freeloader territory. It can be hard to resist the urge to come to the rescue and save the poor lady's computer, but you are not a doctor, you are not a firefighter, and this is not an emergency. Savor the negotiation, make some cash. What's the worst thing that can happen? You don't get the job, and instead continue to enjoy your time.

So I just read the post about blocking some of the websites… Everybody (or almost everybody) suggested to ban the ones that block users with ad blockers. Guys, let me tell you the publisher’s perspective here. Bear with me. So you’re sitting there at home thinking “I think I can give people something great. Something [choose: entertaining, useful, helpful, inspiring] to make their day just a tiny bit better. Inform them of the latest news. Or share my opinion with others. I should create a website” And now, 6 to 12 months after your very first post, you start noticing that people are actually coming back to your website. Again and again. They seem to like it. You still don’t make any money, but the feeling that you have created something that people love is amazing. Fast forward another year. You just figured out that you can actually make some money with this stuff! “So this is my business now? Should I do it full time?” You take the leap of faith, you continue this gig full time, hoping that more and more people would read your stuff, share your stuff, and, eventually, re-pay you in the form of some ad revenue. You, the publisher, now rely on the money that your website makes. It pays your food and rent now. And not just yours, but your employees' as well. Now there are some people who don’t seem to realise that in today’s world you cant get something for nothing. As they say, “if something is free, it means you are the product”. Of course, all of you want to stay informed, be able to read, let’s say, good tech news… Well-written articles from multiple sources, so you can compare the articles and come to your own conclusions. What most of you don’t seem to understand is that for every person that uses an ad blocker, the content out there is becoming slightly shittier. If publishers don’t get paid, they will cut corners, hire cheaper writers, and, my favourite, ADD MORE ADS! And if not, they will add a paywall. Yes, I agree, we clearly need to filter out websites with malware. Yes, we need to have on-demand access to content without a pay wall. And yes, we definitely need more high quality content. Unfortunately for all of us, you can’t have “good”, “cheap” and “accessible at all times” at the same time . The least you can do it disable your ad blocker for sites that you want to support. This is your best way to say “Thank you” to the person who created something for YOU.

Little background: I work at a startup that is looking to integrate blockchain technology into voting systems. It has been shown that current voting technology is susceptible to large-scale hacking that can change election results at the local level. My job description is to enhance the public knowledge about blockchain technology through social media, and I firstly want to conduct a benchmark analysis of how well-known/ understood blockchain technology is.

Let me tell you all a tale of the absolute worst customer service I've ever received from an ISP. Let me preface this by saying I'm moving to a city of about 500 people in rural MN. This is my quest to get internet at the new home. I started with one of those sites where you enter a zip code and it gives you a list of potential ISPs in the area. It gave me a company called Frontier. I gave them a call and talk with a lady who offers me a phone + 24mbps internet package for $80/month. I asked her if it would be cheaper to ditch the phone service to which she answers "No, the bundle actually makes it cheaper." I ask her if I can use my own modem/router. She has no damn idea what I'm talking about. Okay, so we'll go with that and I schedule a install for friday the 10th. She tells me the time range that I have to be there is 8am - 3pm. The fuck?! You mean the whole business day? Whatever. One time thing, I bite the bullet. My roommate decides to look online and sees the have they same internet plan without the phone for $55/month! He gives them a call and they confirm this plan, but tells him I need to call in to get it changed. Understandable. I call them and tell them what's up. Apparently they send out a tech up to 72 hours in advance of the install date and that they can't do anything about it other then send me to customer service. Fine. Customer service tells me it's okay and that they can have the tech just not install the phone service. Super. A bit of a rocky road, but in fairness this one was my bad. Here's where the monster sized poo hits the even larger proverbial fan. It is now Thursday and I get a call around 5 from a lady saying that the person who scheduled the installation was misinformed and there were no 24mbps lines, only 12mbps. That's kind of BS in my eyes, but I tell her that it is acceptable and ask if we can get 2 of those lines coming to the house so we can bond them together to get the speed we were promised. She has no clue what I'm talking about so she sends me to customer service. I ask the guy my questions and he starts looking into it. He comes back and tells me "I'm so sorry, but there are no free ports at all, so we will not be able to give you any internet service at all." I'm bewildered at this point. So just to confirm I asked him "So we cannot get 24, we cannot get 12, we cannot get jack shit?" to which he says yes. I'm absolutely irate at this point. It's so multi-faceted as well. Firstly how the hell did anyone schedule the installation to happen in the first place? And what would've happened if I said yes to the downgrade to 12 and left it at that? Even more confusing was when they were getting to their last few ports available did they have some sort of meeting which I can only assumed went like this... Smith: "Hey, so we can only connect a couple more people or businesses." Stewart: "Oh shit, we need customers to make money, right?" Smith: "That's my understanding, sir." Stewart: "And my current bank account balance is...?" Smith: "$2 million, sir" Steward: "Ehhhh, fuck 'em." So I feel shafted, but I need to figure out a solution. I start calling every ISP I know of around the area, most of which are closed for the day. I get to Charter and they tell me they have a service for finding a new ISP. They forward me to it and I enter my zip code. Sends me to Charter. I talk to the guy and he says this is because Charter can provide TV, but no internet, and that Frontier was the only ISP he saw was available in this city. Fuck. I've given up for the night, but my roommate decided he wanted a piece of Frontier. I get a call from him and he says he successfully set up an account and scheduled an install for our internet next Friday. He's laughing. I die a little on the inside. I'm genuinely curious if he'll get the same call before then. I realize I don't know if the install has been cancelled or what so I go on their live chat. After the first 15 min wait, I say "Hello" and the Frontier rep disconnects. I'm probably on a blacklist. Get into the queue again and this time got someone who replies. This chick just keeps giving me the "Sorry for your inconvenience" BS. Offers a credit for when we get internet. Doesn't share how much that will be. Tells me I'll be on a waiting list until a port is open. And that brings us to the present. I'm guessing we'll look into satellite internet. Will most likely be capped and around 1-5 mbps.

I watched a bit of Johnny Mnemonic the other day, specifically the scene where he's walking through the hotel lobby and a TV screen changes channels to display a message just for him. It caused a bit of a revelation for me, as I realized that such a thing is now quite possible in today's society. Larger companies that have TVs with custom video playing (such as the video ads at Wal-Mart) probably use software to handle their video. All it takes is one of those video streaming computers being connected to the internet, and an opportunity arises for you to send your friends a message when they walk in the door to their favorite building. Other examples of this can be found in the movie 'Gamer'. Doing such a thing would definitely be more trouble than it's worth, but it got me wondering why we don't see more incidents of people hacking the less obvious bits of technology in our lives. The only example I can think of myself is the jpg that's been passed around demonstrating how to change the text on those large, lit-up road signs from 'road work ahead' to 'zombies ahead'. It seems we're not too far off from a society where a 'master hacker' could rapidly gather enough info-streams about you to 'follow' you around ('lol im in ur hotel TV, givin u messages', 'lol im in ur smartphone, watchin u txt', 'lol im in ur taxi meter, trackin ur gps', 'lol im in ur bar's POS system, orderin u drinks', etc., ad nauseam).

I was planning on buying a brand new Laptop, specifically for my work in Video game Creation (UDK and 3Ds Max... etc) I have been looking into getting the dell alienware M11x, however, knowing how these things go, I could probably find something cheaper and better around... So I decided to ask here (after numerous days of ghosting around xD). Is there anything better, perhaps something more suitable for my cause? Thank you very much p.s, Sorry if this is in the wrong section, I am pretty new.

I currently have an aging laptop that is over 4 years old, which I plan on replacing in the near future (about 3 months to a year). The laptop was mostly used for taking notes throughout college and for writing code when I'm away from my primary computer. I have graduated college, and therefore no longer have to take many notes, and also much prefer to program on my desktop, anyways. Therefore, I think I'd like to look into a tablet as a replacement for my laptop. I think Android is a solid platform, and have tried the Galaxy S tablet in cellphone stores, but I think that the form factor is just a bit small for what I'm looking for. The rumored HPPalm "Palmpad" is supposed to be released soon, but I'm not sure if WebOS really has the application backing to be a full laptop replacement (I am currently the happy owner of a WebOS phone, and think the operating system is excellent, though). I should note that I am not interested in iOS devices. Does anyone have any experience with using a tablet instead of their laptop, or opinions on current/upcoming devices?

I just don't get why our 4G throughput is so much lower than other countries. From what I understand, LTE, as a standard, is capable of speeds that far exceed WiMax and HSPA+, yet LTE is being sold as asymmetrical bandwidth (heavy on the downlink) and at speeds HSPA+ is theoretically capable of producing. For the sake of argument, can we please omit the "oh Telecom companies just want your money so they leak technology slowly" and focus more on the technological considerations. Is this a symptom of a lack of backhaul bandwidth in the US, or networking issues of some sort? What's your theory?

43" Pioneer industrial plasma monitor. Model PDP-434CMX. I bought it from my roommate for $600 - couldn't figure out how to make it work with cable/dvd/video games but happily used it to watch DVDs through my computer. Had a friend look at it and try to convert it to HD component, but it wouldn't work. Went to the trouble to hang it on the wall, continued to use it for movies, and all of a sudden it turned off? Now, when I turn it on, it turns on for a second and immediately turns off. Completely useless. My roommate then found one of those HD cables (not component) and it has the input for that, but not component. So I think I'm going to try that. Speakers are a whole separate issue but I have a receiver I'm working with to make that work ... Clearly I'm not a techie, I know a little bit, but I need help with this. Either I can make it work and it will be awesome, or I want to sell it. So I have some questions. 1) How can I make it turn on? What's making it turn off immediately? 2) Should I try out the HD cable for my cable box? If so, is there a different receiver I should get? 3) If I can get #1 answered - what's a fair asking price if I want to sell it?

As a frequent convention goer, I know how important the use of the various mobile card readers available on the market are to the artists, craftsmen, and general shop owners that hold booths to sell their goods. Cash is good and all, but I've seen it become much more common place for every booth owner to have a card reader and deal primarily with card over cash. Now, I understand that card readers are used elsewhere besides cons and that there is the adapter that uses the iPhones charging port to allow for a 3.5 mm jack to be used, but my biggest concern is to now use the readers, you have to have a separate adapter cable to manage (hoping you don't lose the tiny thing or damage it) on top of having to keep up with managing your reader.

Where I live, there is only one internet provider and they do not offer an unlimited data plan. It's stupid and monopolistic and ridiculous. The highest data plan they do offer for home internet is 450 GB per month, which split between three college dudes, there's a lot of streaming that goes on. I complained to the company itself and got nowhere, they were sorry but they couldn't offer anything higher than the 450 plan. Since they weren't any help, I took 5 minutes to write a complaint to the FCC. All I wrote in the description (along with my information) was, "Data caps are unreasonable and unlawful." Within two days, I got an email from my service provider saying that they had received the complaint and could offer me unlimited data for just $10 more a month. Maybe the government doesn't suck alllll the time.

I'll start off by saying - I'm well aware of rss feeds, twitter, or blog posts, etc - for that matter even reddit/r/technology. What I am interested in is a more specific type of feed system that can send exact notifications when certain tech related products update. For example - I want a site like mytechnotifications.com, after a sign up I can then go through precreated lists of tech I want to be notified about. The stuff I want to know about include: I want to know as soon as a new version of Win8 gets released - Alpha, Beta1, Beta2, CTP etc. For that matter, I want to know when a leaked update somehow makes its way on the scene. Android custom ROMS. I want to select from a list of ROMS I'm tracking, I want to know when a new stable build is released, when a nightly build goes live, etc. As it happens! Browser updates - Boom I want to know about it Programming related stuff (various) and will vary from developer to developer. Could be monitoring W3C html 5 standards. I want to drill down from a list and determine when that css selector makes it into a browser as a feature for example. Now I know all this information exists - but it requires manual labor to get at. It also means looking at results from different vendors in different formats. And at times getting the exact info you're looking for is hard. For example - some people follow Minecraft - Notch has a twitter feed, and a blog, or you can wait for the release notes. But there his format differs heavily from the Microsoft Windows 8 core team. I'm after a more standardized and targeted approach for centralizing of tech event notifications that are interesting to me. &

Ignoring ANYTHING to do with money (more specifically, the fact that they are expensive computers, because I do agree that they charge too much), what the hell is up with this? Why oh WHY, do I get downvoted to hell, or berated for saying I use mac. The stereotypes are so fucking outdated, it's kind of funny. I constantly see windows fans talking amongst themselves how Mac users know nothing about computers. Um, what? Where did that come from? MAYBE that was true 6+ years ago, I have no idea, but what the hell. Every Mac user I know is really computer proficient, even with PC hardware. Another, is there are way less programs for mac than PC. OTHER THAN GAMES (there are so many workarounds for that) I have yet to run into this problem. While, it was hard to find a cartographer for minecraft (I was looking in the wrong places), I just have not had this problem. Hell, I can run .EXEs whenever the hell I want, but I never really need to. I've only done that once. These are just two stereotypes, but come on, this shit is outdated. Why do I own a mac, you ask? Well, because I like them. I've owned PCs in the past, I've owned Macs in the past, and I prefer macs. I don't get berated for driving a Ford instead of a [insert preferable brand by butthurts all over]. I don't get berated for drinking Absolute instead of Skyy. But, I get berated for owning/using a mac EVERY time I mention it. So now you want to know what I like about them. Well, the most simple part of it is, FROM MY OWN EXPERIENCE, I don't get any malware or any viruses whatsoever from anything online at all, without any kind of antivirus software, and I don't even have to update the thing very often. I've owned a variety of PCs in my day, and a couple macs (on my second). All the PCs I've owned lasted about a year and a half to two years. I maintained the shit out of those bastards, and spent lots of money on good antivirus software. The PC desktop computers I've owned deteriorated at a slower rate than the laptops, but there was always a noticeable decrease in efficiency/speed/happiness within the first month of use. I always dealt with it, and found ways to get it back up to speed. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my experience, I just really didn't like how fast they deteriorated. Out of the two Macs I've owned (both laptops), there has been no loss in quality. Well, that's not entirely true. My first one (still have it) is kind of sluggish, but I used the shit out of that thing, and it has a lot going on at once. If I actually took a day to uninstal/reinstall shit, update it properly, it would be back to it's speedy self, but I'm a lazy person, and it's not necessary yet. My new laptop is a few months old now. It feels faster than it did when I first got it, but that's probably because it's customized to what I like. Another thing I love about Macbooks is, their hardware. The one I have is made out of aluminum. Fuck yeah. It's burly, solid and strong, and not even really all that heavy. I love it. The two PC laptops I had (similar in value, might I add) deteriorated physically very rapidly. I'm not the most gentle person, but I've been just as rough with my two Macbooks, and they held up fantastically. At this point, 90% of what we do (aside from many games) is online, so there's not much of a difference. I can do anything I did on PC on a Mac, I don't get viruses, I'm a happy person with my computer, and none of this concerns anybody but me, so why do I get berated? **

DNS servers assigned to my router by Timewarner Roadrunner]( [Resolving megaupload.com first using RoadRunner DNS and then Google DNS servers.](

Dear Friend: Thank you for taking the time to contact me regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261). I welcome the opportunity to respond. The Stop Online Piracy Act has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee, of which I am not a member, and was assigned to the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet. The Subcommittee recently held the first of what is sure to be many hearings regarding this legislation. H.R. 3261 has a corresponding bill in the Senate named the Protect IP Act. As you know, the Stop Online Piracy Act aims to combat the theft of U.S. intellectual property. The bill is intended to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online traffic in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. These issues are certainly worth exploring, but it is unclear when the Judiciary may finish its work. Please be assured that I will continue to monitor this very important issue with your thoughts and concerns in mind. In closing, I want to thank you for contacting me. As one who has always personally read and signed all of my mail, it really is important for me to stay in touch with the 700,000 that I represent in southwest Michigan. Jobs and the economy remain my TOP priority. It is not the government that creates jobs, it is the private sector. During these tough economic times, I continue to do all I can to help businesses, large and small, add jobs. As always, I look forward to your continued input on the major issues facing our state and nation. Very truly yours, Fred Upton Member of Congress

So, I think bandwidth caps are a good thing, they are a more accurate way of charging for a service. It seems no one else out there thinks this is so. I want to try to explain why I think it is so. Previously, when expressing this opinion, people have assumed that I must clearly be a right wing republican, or perhaps have no understanding of how networks work, in order to have such repugnant views. How funny and insulting these people are... The Myth of unlimited bandwidth First, I want to say that there is not now, nor will there ever be, a truly unlimited data plan. Unlimited data pipes don't exist, and if you think you have one connected to your computer now, well, you don't. Clearly, there are only so many megabytes that can be transferred over a network connection in a month. Furthermore, nor is there even an easy answer to question of "how many" megabytes that is. The nature of a network is that you're not the only one trying to fit those megabytes through it. Different pipes at different points in the network may become the bottleneck based on usage patterns. (see also my comment on "peak" times below) Your connection is limited You can only transfer so much with your connection. The question is how we should classify and bill it. The traditional method is to do it by speed alone -- that is, to downgrade your hardware's data transfer speed to a lower setting than it is capable of unless you pay for the most expensive data plan. A new possible method would be to classify and bill by total bandwidth consumed in a time period, such as a month. Billing by bandwidth (total bytes) is a more direct and accurate way of charging you for your load on the network since it is not speed of transmission which causes congestion, but rather total bytes transferred. Limiting speed affects you even if you loaded just a single webpage all month. Limiting bandwidth only affects you when you attempt to transfer huge amounts of data. All people who oppose bandwidth caps are implicitly favoring speed caps as the way of controlling network traffic demand. Speed caps can't be abolished, but... Of course we can never do away with speed caps. They too are an intrinsic limit of the hardware, and ISP's will likely continue to impose further speed limits on all customers who do not sign up to the fastest plan. I believe they will do this mostly due to historic reasons and due to customer backlash against a change in billing patterns to control total bytes and not speed. Note that mobile data plans are usually not billed by what speed your connection is, with all devices usually allowed to connect at their full capable speed. This is because mobile data speeds are (until recently) much slower. If the current consumer backlash against bandwidth caps continues then I think we will see operators are forced to limit mobile data speed (instead of total bytes) in order to stop congestion and ensure service. This will be especially true observing that next generation (4G LTE) devices can deliver 100mbps. On "peak times" Some point out that at night and other non-peak times the network is not congested and bandwidth is then free. This is true. To make billing even more direct and accurate ISP's should charge by only usage at peak times, much as how cell phone plans often include "free nights and weekends". This would likely be a good idea. The only downside is that it makes data plans less simple. Summary Internet bandwidth demand increases at a fast pace. If the situation were instead static, with consumers demanding the same bandwidth year after year, then technology would likely accommodate them quickly, allowing for un-capped (by speed or bandwidth) data plans. This is not the case Bottom Line (

We at Latitude Research, a media research consultancy outside of Boston, are conducting an open innovation study around the future of gaming. The study consists of a short (5-10 minute) survey. We will be publishing the results and producing a documentary. We're currently seeking experts and enthusiasts to appear in the documentary - so, the survey also serves as a screening to find said subjects. We'r e particularly interested in gamification and how it can be applied in the offline world to better life experiences. [Fill out the survey](

Dear Eric, > >Thank you for contacting me regarding the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property (PROTECT IP) Act of 2011. I appreciate having the opportunity to know your views on issues of importance to Northwest Florida and our nation. > >The Internet has become a central part of the American economy, delivering innovative products around the world; however, the free flow of information on the Internet has also created problems with copyright and trademark infringement. According to independent studies, companies that rely on intellectual property to sustain their businesses account for more than $7.7 trillion and employ more than 19 million workers in the US. A recent report commissioned by NBC Universal contends that nearly 24% of all Internet traffic worldwide is infringing on intellectual property rights. > >To help protect intellectual property rights, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont introduced the PROTECT IP Act on May 12, 2011. This legislation would authorize the Attorney General or an intellectual property right owner to commence legal action against individuals who operate or register an Internet site dedicated to activities infringing on the copyrights of others. In situations where the individual cannot be located, the Attorney General could proceed against the domain name. The bill would also provide immunity from liability for Internet advertising services and financial transaction providers that take preventative measures against copyright infringing Internet sites. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted to report the PROTECT IP Act to the full Senate on May 26, 2011. > >While Congress should take measures to protect intellectual property from illegal infringement, it must not threaten the environment of free speech and information sharing that has caused the Internet to become an engine of innovation. There are concerns that the broad definition of an Internet site dedicated to infringing activity could encompass speech protected by the First Amendment, and that domain name service blocking could affect the Internet's reliability, security, and performance. I believe it is important to thoroughly address all concerns as debate on this issue continues. However, I do believe that maintaining openness on the Internet can be achieved while providing security for those who want to protect their intellectual property online. Rest assured, I will keep your thoughts in mind should this bill come before the House of Representatives for a vote. > >If you would like to receive further information on issues of importance to you, please log on to my website at As always, please feel free to contact my office if you have any further concerns. > >Sincerely, > >Jeff Miller Member of Congress" I've got this same email from him twice now. [email protected] is the email address I received this from, if you all want to give Jeff Miller a piece of your mind. How can someone just blatantly disregard someones opinion with a generic copy and pasted email? Let's get this to the top and see what Jeff Miller thinks when he get's to hear thousands millions of peoples opinions. EDIT: formatting. EDIT2: I've also received the following email from him three times. >"Dear Constituent, > >Thank you for your recent e-mail. I value your interest in the legislative process and appreciate your comments about the issues important to you. Your input helps me do a better job serving you and all Americans. > >Your input is very valuable and your patience is appreciated as it takes time to respond to the large amount of mail that comes into my office. Please allow several weeks for a written reply. > >To receive my newsletter, please visit my website at Thank you again for your interest in the policies that affect both Florida and our nation. > >With warm personal regards, I am > >Sincerely, > >Jeff Miller Member of Congress Florida, 1st District"

I happened across an article (on reddit, of course) concerning Apple's [faulty MagSafe power adapters which represent a fire hazard]( As a MacBook owner, I set about trying to determine which models were affected as my MagSafe power adapter, too, was fraying. I contacted Apple's technical support department as recommended at [Apple's website]( The woman at the other end refused to tell me (1) which models were eligible for replacement; (2) where I could find additional information about the recall; and, (3) how I could go about replacing the faulty MagSafe power adapter. With every question, the woman at the other end told me that I would have to purchase AppleCare in order for her to answer any of my questions. In fact, [apple.com]( states that the user should contact Apple Technical Support for additional information. Eventually, I made an appointment to meet with a "Genius" at my local Apple Store to replace the faulty adapter. When I asked the rep about Apple's lack of candor pertaining to this matter he told me that he was aware that this was the case but that there was nothing that he could do about it. Additional reading: [MagSafe Criticisms and Defects]( [About Apple's Adapter Replacement Program]( [Troubleshooting MagSafe adapters]( [Apple Sued Over MagSafe Adapter Fire]( [Apple announces Magsafe out of warranty replacement program](

Note: I was writing about this experience for an English course, then realized how applicable it was in regards to SOPA. It might be tough for some to see why SOPA is such a big deal, hope this helps. As a soldier in Afghanistan I had the opportunity to experience many things that are uncommon to most westerners. My team and I spent several months patrolling a series of remote villages along a seasonal river in order to build a better relationship with the people in the area. The area was one of the least visited by international forces. On multiple occasions I met nomads that had never seen westerners and some who thought we might be Russians (who had been there in the 1980's). I met very few people in the area that were able to read. Schools were found mainly in cities. It was rare for locals in these villages to travel much, with many individuals spending the entirety of their life in the same village of maybe a hundred people. During my time in these villages I did not once see a woman over the age of around 8 or so. The only source of electricity in the area was through running a power line off of a car or motorcycle battery, which would allow one to charge a cell phone or radio. There were no landlines, no internet access, basically no telecommunications. Hardly anyone can read and so there are very few books or newspapers. A national telecommunications company had tried to erect a cell tower in the area. The tower lasted only a week or so before local Taliban blew it up. Initially I wasn't sure as to why the Taliban had blown up the tower as they could benefit from use of the tower as well. What I soon came to realize is that what they feared was the knowledge that would come with cell phones. After spending a considerable amount of time with the locals it became clear that their only source of information, of news, was by word of mouth. A majority of what they knew about the outside world came from travelers, and a significant portion of the travelers through the area were Taliban. The Taliban in the area were able to effectively control the incoming knowledge of the local populace as the only source of new information came from travelers (word of mouth). Additionally, the Taliban set up random checkpoints in and out of the area in order to control both the goods that were coming in and out of the area as well as the people and thus the knowledge. From an outsider's perspective it was easy to see that the Taliban were controlling and manipulating the local population, to the benefit of the Taliban and detriment of the locals. They were effectively spreading propaganda against the central government and against international forces. The locals, however, had no way of knowing that they were being controlled and manipulated in a way that was detrimental to their own well-being. This may be an oversimplification, but you don't know what you don't know. If you've never been exposed to a certain material, a certain set of knowledge, then you can know neither its validity nor its significance. It's been said that knowledge will set you free. For those of us that already have a good deal in the way of personal freedom, I'd say that knowledge is what will keep us free. The United States has been a worldwide leader when it comes to freedom of information. It's my assessment that SOPA is a step backwards, a step that will neither help the general public nor the majority of US businesses. Not everything regarding U.S. copyright bill is bad, but the manner of enforcement and the liability placed on businesses and individuals by this bill could be extremely detrimental. If you think it really can't be that bad go ahead and read it yourself:

Hi tech gurus, So heres my situation: I got an used fat ps3, and after spending 60$ to get it fixed because of a red light, it broke down again after the 3 months ( no more guarantee from the technician ), so I decided to fix it myself and to my amazement I fixed it! ( Im a tech noob, dont know difference from 1kb to gb ). But after that ordeal I think fixing again is going to be a pain in the butt, so I want to get a new ps3. Im planning to put it in my room, but I dont know if I should get a tv or a projector for it... Can anyone tell me what I should get? Thx in advance =D

From reading [the thread about the guy with the stolen (or maybe not) laptop]( it seems a lot of people still haven't discovered Dropbox. Dropbox is an online backup/sharing site, which works by installing a small program on your computer, which will then watch a directory of your choosing and continually upload files in this directory as you change them. This means you'll have a constantly up to date backup. There are clients for Windows, Linux, OS X, iPhones/iPod Touch and Android phones (Blackberry "Coming soon" according to their site). But wait - there's more! You can even share these folders with other Dropbox users, so when you change a file, it gets updated on their computer and vice-versa. By default, you get 2GB of storage, but you can get 250MB extra each time someone signs up through a referral link of yours, up to a maximum of 10GB. Signing up through a referral link also gives you a starting point of 2GB+250MB This is where this thread appears. Post your referral link if you're already a member, and sign up through a referral link if you're not, then post your referral link. At the very least, everyone gets 250MB extra - the lucky will get more. If you reach the 10GB limit, please edit your post to remove your link to spread the love as much as possible. If you don't feel like taking part in this, go to [dropbox.com]( and sign up there. It's still awesome. Edit:

Sorry if this is in the wrong subtopic. I first Port Forwarded my Linksys WRT300N router about a month ago to host a minecraft server with a few friends. It went very well without issues once i figured out how to do it (port 25565). Then Terraria came out, and a few of us bought that as well. So i set up a server, port forwarded to port 3133 (changed to 7777) later. I never had any issues with any of the servers until today. 12 Hours ago we were all playing terraria together without issues. Today though, for some reason my server wasn't working. I check one of the websites to check if your ports are open, and NONE of them are. For some reason all of my ports that were working fine are no longer. The router settings have not changed at all. I contacted Linksys through the live chat support. I was told that it is not a common problem, but they cannot help me specifically due to my warrenty being up. Has this happened to anyone before and are there fixes for it? I really want to be able to play games with my friends hosting from my computer again (not using Hamachi) I have unplugged/Plugged in and rebooted everything multiple times and no luck

Reddit, You should be very pleased with the results of the GoDaddy boycott. I am. As I'm sure you know, though, we must continue to boycott companies who support SOPA in order to have significant influence on what happens in congress. Any company is fair game, I suppose, but I've seen people advocate the boycott of properties owned by Time Warner, Viacom, and other -huge- corporations who don't really have that much of a personal relationship with their consumers. Not only would it be hard to boycott these companies for this reason, but boycotting them would mean pretty much not watching any television or going to any movies. At all . I'm sure some of us could work up the courage to do this, but let's be realistic. Making this happen in large enough numbers to have lasting influence would be nearly impossible. Right now it would be, anyway. GoDaddy, however, was an easy target because the relationship to the consumer was direct and their product was one which was not a bare necessity and could easily be switched. GoDaddy realized this and they caved on their support for SOPA as a result of the boycotts. For this reason, I think the community boycotting pro-SOPA companies should focus on the easier targets first. Smaller companies. Companies whose products we need, but don't dominate our lives and that can easily be switched for non-SOPA companies' products. Show everyone that we can have influence by tackling targets we can tackle easily first. Then as we progress, we can gradually attack more difficult targets. A snowball effect, if you will. I've put together a small list of companies who would not be that difficult to protest/boycott as examples. These companies include: Zippo Manufacturing (Those people who make the lighters). Get generic lighters instead. Rite Aid and CVS. Get your drugs at Walgreen's. Don't have a Rite Aid or CVS? That's okay. They're shitty anyway. Lexmark, INC. Get generic ink if you have a Lexmark printer. Blue Sky Studios, INC. Stop watching all of those shitty Ice-Age movies. Electronic Arts. You've got all eighty versions of John Madden Football. Perhaps you could afford to skip a year? This is by no means an exhaustive list. That can be found here . The effort to boycott pro-SOPA companies is a great one. However, we don't want to bite off more than we can chew. The best way to approach this is to tackle as many targets as possible. The best way to tackle as many targets as possible is to tackle the easiest ones first. Maybe once Viacom, Time Warner, Wal-Mart, et al. see the sheer number of heads flying, they'll change their tune. :)

Let's assume that despite all the protests, SOPA amazingly gets passed in HoR, passed through Obama (if he's still in office when SOPA gets passed), and declared constitutional in the supreme court (despite how outrageous it would be). What would be we do then? All our efforts for naught? Now, from what I'm understanding, the way SOPA works is to simply seize the domain name, and redirect it (along with the search engine removal). The server is still there and patiently awaiting a connection. Well, what if it could be bypassed, such as censorship is in other countries, with tools like TOR and Freenet? What I'm proposing is a P2P (or decentralized) DNS system. Not a simple idea, as there are many problems with that I see with it. I couldn't come up with a sure way to prove that you own the domain name (because I don't know how it works in the first place), and for that matter if the look up is referring to the right IP address. Somebody could easily replace the IP, and when you ask it for that Url, it redirects you to what they wanted (shock site, malicious site that redirects you to the actual site after installing payload, etc). My solution to this would be to connect to multiple servers, 3 or more servers. Each one checks, and compares. If it's not the proper IP from one, it relies on the other two (still faulty, I know), if they all have different IP's, drop these servers, and connect to other servers. Dynamic IP's would also be a problem. If the IP ever changes, it would provide a faulty address which wouldn't work. Not to mention, it could cause conflicts between servers if they don't automatically get changed. I haven't found a solution to this problem. New IP's would have to be propagated through the network. I haven't found a good method for this, but when a server doesn't know an address, it could ask the other servers? One other implementation (that I thought of while writing)is there could be a .fw (Free Web) domain registered through this system, and any domain name could be registered for free (or a small fee... bitcoins? Money for charities?). These would then redirect to the IP, but then we would have to come up with some form of regulation so one couldn't just redirect at will (which I have a few ideas that if everyone thinks this is the better idea, I could explain.) You ask: Don't TOR and Freenet do this already? Yes, but not in the same way. The URL for TOR is a finger print, and (from what I understand) doesn't give you a direct location to it, so it can take some time for it to reach the server, and retrieve the information, then it has to make it's way back to you through the TOR network. Not to mention, exit nodes can inject Javascript into the web page to acquire an IP or other malicious intent for the unwary, and unsavvy. Freenet relies on users, and a P2P network (once again, from what I understand), so unless there are a lot of people viewing the same content, it can take a long time(for larger files). They both have their upsides, and their flaws. What I am suggesting is a lightweight system, with very little encryption, and is meant to skirt SOPA and other censorship methods that don't take control of the server, but rather the easy and lazy way that has become DNS. I am looking to Reddit to see if they agree if this is a way to fight back against SOPA, if it's a feasible idea, and if it's feasible to implement. I myself have very little actual professional language practice, so at this moment I couldn't make it myself, but a community could come together (/r/programming?)

A little background. I work in IT supporting about 350 users who all have laptops purchased from Dell. We have a budget of $600-800 for a laptop including a 3 year next business day warranty. We buy generall buy in bulk anywhere from 10-40 units at a time but occasionally get single units too. I usually do a little searching to find laptops and specs in our price range then get a quote. We have a "team" of representatives assigned to our "small/medium business" (A whole other topic on divisions, their call transfer and chat/region/enterprise/consumer/small-medium business bullshit round-about system could be created). The idea of having a representative is to achieve better pricing as a result of volume and repeat business. Often times though, the quotes from the sales team is substantially higher than Dell's own consumer website. Here is an example: As you can see, the unit price quoted from our representative is $518+67 tax. The Consumer site was $449+tax for the same unit. I asked our representative what the difference was and he said the processor in his quote was a pentium and online's was celeron. I checked again and highlighted the selected areas where it shows the exact same processor in each. I am still waiting for that reply. This isn't the first time it has happened either. We ended up placing an order for 20 units right through the consumer website with a credit card which saved us $75 a unit. Next time Dell gives you a quote, check out some alternative options for obtaining the quote, either from Dell or a different company. Even within Dell you will get different pricing depending on whether you call go online or who your representative is. We even have a third party we sometimes contract out for special server programming and installation that can often times get better pricing from their representative. We have different representatives fighting over our business within Dell. Maybe next time I will vent at their customer care and parts ordering system. I don't have much experience with other vendors as management love their Dell for some reason, but I am always looking and trying to present them alternatives. /end rant

I love my mouse but I know it is getting on in years. Whenever I'm at an electronics store, I always look but have never seen one with the same design - namely a trackball that is moved by the index and middle finger, while the thumb does right and left clinging (the ring finger and pinky control forward and back buttons). Yesterday, I dropped my old yet reliable track ball mouse. After I picked it up, I heard some severe rattling inside it. Also the buttons were basically hanging on by threads. Sadly, I concluded that my mouse had finally met its end. A quick search on the internet had me in total shock. [Here is the one I found on ebay.]( There is a side market on repairing and refurbishing these mice - apparently the ceramic bearings are the first thing to go. I guess, like many others, I am attached and very used to using this mouse and would not like to use any other. Stunned but not defeated, I carefully took apart my mouse and found inside it about 20 tiny plastic shards approximately 2 or 3 millimeters in size. Luckily, I had just bought a 4 pack of super glue, I have experience with electronic devices, and I love a good puzzle. It took me about 3 hours, but I carefully glued every piece back in place and sealed it back together. The left mouse button needs a little extra pressure to click (it's already being broken in; either that or I'm just getting used to clicking it harder), but otherwise I am very happy with my work. I would say it's in perfect working order now - better than it's worked in years. I hope I get another 5 to 10 years out of this device and I plan to be very careful with it from now on. -

They will not be caught Congress, in coordination with the Justice Department, will market an advancing threat to national network infrastructure. Support for proposed legislation (mandated server logs, COICA, PROTECT IP), unseen legislation, and invasive agency investigative powers will increase even more Such legislation and investigative measures will be pushed on the rest of us

At the time, I am still 2 years away from being able to return to school. I am asking for advice on how to land a reception position at a company I desperately want to work for. The company: Forward-thinking, focusing on new ideas rather than existing technologies. Exactly what interests me, I desperately want to join their team Their current receptionist is retiring, and they are hiring for this position, start date in 2 months and it is a permanent position. There is no chance for promotion as they stick with engineers and such as they are focused on developing new technologies. I am more than happy with this. It is an excellent opportunity to take part in the industry with my current skill set. I would hope to work there for at least 2 years, likely more as I would prefer to take evening courses for my education for the first few years (I plan on taking an alternative energy program at a technology institute to further my skill set for the field). The short form of my resume is: Run my own website (5 months and current) Assist in coordinating and throwing events (3 years and current) Promote regularly for the music industry (3 years and current) Reception Manager at an athletic club (1 year and current) Have worked as a secretary (1 year) Survery Reseach (6 months) Customer Service - Fine dining (4 years) Education: 2 years University in General Studies (the particular university didn't end up having something I wished to continue on in as it was arts based) Hobbies: Various activism Music Reading Writing Learning and discussing new technologies and science with my man (gotta love having a partner that can challenge your mind <3) I could probably get letters of recommendation from my GM, my HO contact, Yoshi Chubachi, and possibly the owner of the restaurant I worked at I would like any advice you can give me and hope to hear from people in the field. What can I do to ensure I will land this job? I have limited finances but am willing to do nearly anything to get it. I will even relocate and pay for it myself as this office is located in another city. I won't get an opportunity like this for some time, I live in an oil-happy region. Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated

So, I dropped my iPhone 3gs into a cup of water yesterday. Everything seems to work on it except for the screens backlight. I've taken it apart and put it in front of a fan for the last 10 hours. Backlight still isn't working, I tried google'ing where exactly inside the phone the backlight would be controlled, I can't seem to find anything. If someone could tell me where the backlight is located, inside the phone, or any idea to get it working i'd greatly appriciate it. I know I'm going to get a lot of scolding for dropping my phone in the water. It's not my fault really, I had it on the charger, and I keep the cord wrapped up inside it self, so when I bumped it it had nowhere to go but to swing, and drop into a cup of water a foot or two away from where the phone had been sitting in the first place. :\

Time for Epoch Win. Memory extension device , wirelessly charged, mesh Wireless network. Want. Real time voice recognition, OCR, Text to speach Translate Any language realtime Buzz Words: [Super]( [Capacitors]( [Resonant Inductive Coupling]( [Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum]( Please help me solidify this idea, your input is requested! .\ The evolution of our species is closely linked to our ability to communicate. It is because of writing that Science exits. We can share ideas and thoughts with people we have never met, who may be long dead. We 'stand on the shoulders of giants' (thx Mr. Sagan!) with every new advance. The power to control information is the power to control a people. The Pharaoh knew this, the churches knew this, the governments know this. It is time we take the power back , and Free the Information. No knowledge shall be kept from humankind. Hello fellow Redditors, l have an idea. This idea will soon become a plan, this plan will be product soon enough. I have been working on this for many years now, the appropriate technologies have only recently been realized. When the idea is complete, the prototype will be built. This device is not made for profit, the idea is open for all to share. As long as it is built, we (redditors in particular) win. Let the theory and philosophy of Free Information be at your side, its time to stand on the shoulders of some giants. I have been calling this device the Thinking Machine for the last few years as I have been piecing together details of how to make it tick. In metaphor, I can describe it as a modern day printing press, doing for websites what Johannes Gutenberg's printing press did for books. The Thinking machine will be able to read books to you from a differant language. It will be able to translate foreign speech in realtime, allowing you to interact with any culture. In practicality, this will give every person the ability to record any/every moment of their day, have it voice recognized, tagged, and transmitted at anytime to anywhere. In its first format, it will look something like a blutooth headset with a camera attached. See [Looxcie]( for an approximation. This device will have a high quality stereo microphone optimized for human voice recognition. It will be powered by a silver/li-ion based super-capacitor capable of being fully charged in ~30 seconds. It will be charged by electromagnectic inductance, ala Tesla, from upto 15 meters away. It will communicate on a wireless mesh network, capable of ~10 mile point to point range with frequency hopping and spectrum sharing. Toss in a 32GB microSD buffer just incase you are not in network range. This should give us a device that we can keep constantly charged and recording, alway on and always online. Imagine the possibilities if every time you had a late night stoner geek-out about philosophy technology and were able to review the mind blowing details the next day, or even better, share them without having to summarize. Imagine next time you get pulled over, you have a perfect recording of what was done, so when the officer makes one mistake on his disposition, the system works for you. Imagine next time you get into a fight with your significant other about who said, you can find out for sure which one of you is actually the crazy one... Imagine all of the Alien abduction stories that would become factual stories about what really happened. How many miracles would science benefit from having them recorded? The list goes on and on of things that would known if we had the ability to extend our memories, and share our experiences not only with others, but with ourselves. Imagine being able to see everything you do and say for yourself, how much better you could know yourself. (Cue "This is the Dawn of the Age of Aquarius" music) I submit this idea this idea to my fellow readers of reddit. I have discussed this project for hours on end IRL, its time I bring in the big guns. Reddit's forums will serve as a collaboration point for all those interested in adding to idea. Please post all relevant links and thoughts, I will answer all questions to the best of my ability. More to follow. Please discuss all moral, legal, and technical concerns- The comments will get interesting :)

Time for Epoch Win. Memory extension device , wirelessly charged, mesh Wireless network. Want. Real time voice recognition, OCR, Text to speach Translate Any language realtime Buzz Words: [Super]( [Capacitors]( [Resonant Inductive Coupling]( [Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum]( .\ The evolution of our species is closely linked to our ability to communicate. It is because of writing that Science exits. We can share ideas and thoughts with people we have never met, who may be long dead. We 'stand on the shoulders of giants' (thx Mr. Sagan!) with every new advance. The power to control information is the power to control a people. The Pharaoh knew this, the churches knew this, the governments know this. It is time we take the power back , and Free the Information. No knowledge shall be kept from humankind. Hello fellow Redditors, l have an idea. This idea will soon become a plan, this plan will be product soon enough. I have been working on this for many years now, the appropriate technologies have only recently been realized. When the idea is complete, the prototype will be built. This device is not made for profit, the idea is open for all to share. As long as it is built, we (redditors in particular) win. Let the theory and philosophy of Free Information be at your side, its time to stand on the shoulders of some giants. I have been calling this device the Thinking Machine for the last few years as I have been piecing together details of how to make it tick. In metaphor, I can describe it as a modern day printing press, doing for websites what Johannes Gutenberg's printing press did for books. The Thinking machine will be able to read books to you from a differant language. It will be able to translate foreign speech in realtime, allowing you to interact with any culture. In practicality, this will give every person the ability to record any/every moment of their day, have it voice recognized, tagged, and transmitted at anytime to anywhere. In its first format, it will look something like a blutooth headset with a camera attached. See [Looxcie]( for an approximation. This device will have a high quality stereo microphone optimized for human voice recognition. It will be powered by a silver/li-ion based super-capacitor capable of being fully charged in ~30 seconds. It will be charged by electromagnectic inductance, ala Tesla, from upto 15 meters away. It will communicate on a wireless mesh network, capable of ~10 mile point to point range with frequency hopping and spectrum sharing. Toss in a 32GB microSD buffer just incase you are not in network range. This should give us a device that we can keep constantly charged and recording, alway on and always online. Image the possibilities if every time you had a late night stoner geek-out about philosophy technology and were able to review the mind blowing details the next day, or even better, share them without having to summerize. Image next time you get pulled over, you have a perfect recording of what was done, so when the officer makes one mistake on his disposition, the system works for you. Image next time you get into a fight with your significant other about who said, you can find out for sure which one of you is actually the crazy one... Imagine all of the Alien abduction stories that would become factual stories about what really happened. How many miracles would science benefit from having them recorded? The list goes on and on of things that would known if we had the ability to extend our memories, and share our experiences not only with others, but with ourselves. Image being able to see everything you do and say for yourself, how much better you could know yourself. (Cue "This is the Dawn of the Age of Aquarius" music) I submit this idea this idea to my fellow readers of reddit. I have discussed this project for hours on end IRL, its time I bring in the big guns. Reddit's forums will serve as a collaboration point for all those interested in adding to idea. Please post all relevant links and thoughts, I will answer all questions to the best of my ability. More to follow. Please discuss all moral, legal, and technical concerns- The comments will get interesting :)

We're really exited to announce that RPAC's members have voted to make net neutrality the focus of the organization. We're busy setting up the basics of how this is all going to work. But we wanted to let you know of our direction and ask for your help. This is an important time for net neutrality. Some of its strongest allies in Congress lost their seats in the recent election. While there's no doubt that's a setback, it also presents the opportunity to reach out to a whole new set of potential supporters on both sides of the aisle. We intend to do exactly that and build a lasting and meaningful consensus around Internet freedom. You might question whether this bipartisan approach is possible. We're convinced that it is because net neutrality goes beyond left versus right. Ultimately it's a choice between freedom and control, the people versus the corporations. That's why we look forward to rallying Americans from across the political spectrum around the need for a free and open Internet. We need your help to make this happen though. We want your passion, your brilliant ideas, your skill sets, your hard work, and your support for net neutrality. With your help, we can do this, Reddit. Please take a minute to register on our [website]( to show your support or volunteer. And be sure to join us over at [/rpac](

I was recently assigned to a project as an internally-outsourced developer. The project I'm going to work on is for a British financial institution. At the beginning everything sounded cool until we got introduced to the environment in which they do development (in the UK!) to start off with - as it often is in financial institutions most of the code is legacy. The specific part which we are gonna reuse is java 1.4 and Struts 1. It communicates with some even weirder stuff including some cobol and who knows what else. But this is not a problem. Even the JavaDoc comments like "@param parameter description" etc are not. What we are required to do to do the development is first connecting through Citrix to a VM which is just a hop to connect to developer's workstation (all windows based; dev machines have 4 vCPU and 8GB RAM). As you can guess it's not the best experience because of the network latency; and the performance of these VM's can't even match my 1.6KG laptop. Another quirk is that they use StarTeam for version control. I'm guessing not many of you heard about this thingy (I got to know that such a thing exists 1 month ago) so I will explain in a few words: It seems to be Configuration/Change Management tool, with version control, if I'm not wrong includes bug tracker etc. But it's totally different from what I was familiar with (SVN, Git). It works more like sharepoint, you need to check-out files and then you acquire a lock, so actually there should be just one person at a time working on a file... at least you don't have conflicts&merges in such a case lol.... But it's not the end... the new application is going to use some of the old code as dependencies, not to rewrite everything and with the aim to deliver something quickly; we haven't even started coding and the PM already told us that we are one week behind the schedule, and we were actually waiting for the project to begin (they were doing HLD and other stuff, so they were all busy and we got some temporary assignment for the time being). But they didn't have time to make sure we have a server with Java 8 and licensed Weblogic 12c (that's what they want to use for the new applications they develop). So the solution is that if it's possible we install this things on an existing server where some older apps are hosted; or if it's not possible then use the same software as they use.... (Java 6, Weblogic 10). Well, good planning... The most annoying part of it is that they can't really explain why they do development this way (I don't think it's contractual). For me it seems just that the people up there (managers?) don't want to bother and spend money introducing changes. Moving dev environment with all the servers etc would require effort, but I think it would pay off, and they probably need to do it at some point anyway. For sure the developers would be more efficient and less frustrated.... Regarding StarTeam they are talking about some alternatives but seeing how its going, hearing that configuration managers are familiar with StarTeam but they are not with other tools, I'm not sure when and if they are gonna do something about it. It is really weird for me that people who have never done any development impose what we use... I tried to clarify why everything is like that with some "local" (British) developers/tech leads. Most of them complain about the set up as well, but they don't seem to be as frustrated as me. All of them are concentrated on what we/they have to do, high level designs etc. And managers are fluent at avoiding answering question properly and talking a lot about other things. It's frustrating when they ask what we need for the development, if there are any "blockers", but I feel like my concerns are ignored. I haven't seen any Jenkins either, so for me it looks like a 3rd world of software development (and this statement insults the 3rd world...). It might be hard for me to change project quickly as they are some kind of client for us, so probably I have just two choices: either shut up and not let my frustration grow or look for another job :) Do I exaggerate complaining about the way they do development? Do you have experience developing through Remote Desktop (they decline us even VPN access). I could write the code locally, but to test anything I would still need to run it inside of their weird environment as there would be too many things to mock to run it locally. PS. I just wrote what I understood from a few conversations I had and documents I found on Sharepoint, but some things i wrote can be not totally precise. I got involved in this project just recently (compared to people who work there for years); they develop, maintain and support all the applications for this client and it's not that small system and not that small group of people working in this way. PS2. I'm frustrated and I might send a link to this topic to some manager :)

I took apart my old Zen Vision: M and I now have this sweet, little 30GB HD (along with a couple diffraction gratings and what is effectively now a polarized mirror), but I don't know where to get the appropriate cable for connecting to it. The connector is a small female end with a whole bunch of parallel contacts on the inside. I'm not experienced enough with this sort of thing to know if the connector's special or just an ordinary type of ATA. Any helpful tips? A picture can be provided if necessary. It would be nice if I could throw an adapter on it to connect to something more useful like USB, too. Here's the datasheet:

Having to travel for business, and carrying some network stuff in my suitcase. Is the TSA going to freak out? This will be domestic (within the US) flights and items will include: HP 1410-24G Switch NetConnect 1000N Firewall 50' Cat6 Cable Crimpers, ends, etc Clear 4G Modem/Router External hard drives (2x)

I'm seeing a lot of hate for RIM and Blackberry lately because they've stated that they're handing over personal data that relates to the recent London riots. Well, I'm by no means a lawyer, but I think that accusations that RIM is breaching their privacy policy demands research. RIM's [privacy policy]( states: > Except as part of the sale of all or substantially all of the assets of RIM, RIM will not sell, trade or rent your personal information to any third party unless we have your consent. We will only use and/or disclose personal information in order to: understand and meet your needs and preferences; develop new and enhance existing service and product offerings; manage and develop our business and operations; and meet legal and regulatory requirements . It also states > Except as required by law , we will not use or disclose your personal information for any purpose for which you refuse us consent or later withdraw your consent. Well, I guess we have to look at legal and regulatory requirements. The [Blackberry Solution Legal Agreement for the UK]( states, starting on page 6: > You and Your Authorised Users will not transmit harassing, abusive, libellous, illegal or deceptive messages, content or information using Your BlackBerry Solution or any portion thereof; > You and Your Authorised Users will not use Your BlackBerry Solution, or any part thereof, to commit or attempt to commit a crime or facilitate the commission of any crime or other illegal or tortious acts ... > You hereby authorise RIM to cooperate with: (i) law enforcement authorities in the investigation of suspected criminal violations ;

Well I tried to check my gmail and my password was changed(weird already) So I change it to something different using a different email and 2 minutes after that it was changed again, So I panicked and deleted my gmail, hotmail, and fb.. I was wondering how bad I screwed up? I'm running scans with MSE and Malwarebytes, I think they may come up clean. Problem is that now I have no way of getting emails from any place I've registered in the past 7 years, including Steam where I have about $100 worth of games. What can I do if Steam sends me a confirmation code to my deleted email when it gives me the "Sign-in from different computer" message? edit -

I love the snap feature in windows 7, i have a macbook and almost hate using it because of OSX lack of a snap feature. But i feel it needs a little update. When you drag the window to the corner, i think the window should resize to occupy that corner of the screen. That way if you have 3 or 4 folders your working with you could rearrange them quickly and efficiently. [Like this](

So when avoiding doing maths, I decided to do some maths. This is what I found out and it will blow your mind! 1 sperm = 37.5 MB (37.5 x 10^6) 1 ejaculation = A data transfer of 15,875 GB or 15.50 TB (15.5 x 10^12) (Lloyd et al, 2012) 1 newborn = roughly 7.5 pounds 1 pound = 0.453592 7.5 x 0.453592 = 3040194 which is 3.402 kg (3 d.p) "Total data stored in our newborn will be in exabytes = 2952.936 EB (roughly) To give you an idea, this is equal to: 928,972,800,000,000 mp3's, 675,574,468,085 dvd's and 127,008,000,000 Blu-ray disks!" (Parascientifica.com, 2006-2015) "An Exabyte 1000 Petabytes. 2.2 Exabytes: According to Charles Stross, all data recorded by our species in 2003 246 Exabytes: Total storage of the Internet in 2006." (Holmes T,2005)

After reading the article, I decided to do some research. If they did it, who else does? It turns out, that Most antivirus products do this too. One may think: That's ok, they're a security company. That's what I pay for. But they cannot do this, it undermines what SSL is meant for: A secure end to end connection. Additionally, they open themselves up to the same exact kind of attack, there is almost nothing different. For instance, Avast! Antivirus, uses this to display a notice when you visit a porn site or bank site. They try to upsell you on a VPN product. Proofs: Avast's prompt when visiting a bank site under SSL: Root Certificate Authorities installed: IE and Bing on SSL, but that's not Microsoft: Google & Chrome, but that's not Google's certificate:

Hey Reddit. Full disclosure: I didn't write the below text (it's our official copy), but I am a member of Arch Reactor, and will answer your questions and actually interact with you; this isn't some faceless advertising campaign. Are you a self-described 'techie' that is looking for your niche? Arch Reactor, St. Louis' first Hackerspace is a co-op workshop and club for techies, tinkerers and free thinkers. Part arts and technology clubhouse, part training ground for new skills and knowledge, Arch Reactor is a place for residents of St. Louis and surrounding areas to share and receive educational information and training on various topics and skills with access to the tools you otherwise couldn't afford on your own. We offer work space for all kinds of artistic and technological pursuits in a fun and social environment. Interested in learning more about what we are doing and how you might get involved? Come visit our new space and talk to the members! There will be several presentations on different topics by group members and the group will be showcasing several projects and activities, such as a MakerBot, a life-sized version of the game Jenga, a Japanese Arcade Game tournament, and other member projects and hobbies. See our website for a schedule. This event is free to all. Drinks and refreshments will be provided. Donation are appreciated. Tell your friends! Tell your neighbors! Tell anyone that's interested in building, learning and above all, DOING! Important details (or

ok, so I have windows live photo gallery. Every time I try to open a picture on my laptop an error window pops up saying (paraphrased) "we can't open your picture so fuck you for asking". It then says that the error code is 0x80070000. I called tech support, and Windows tech support was as helpful as ever (so no help there). The program works fine on my desktop. But on my laptop it's shitty. I've tried uninstalling and re-installing it. I've tried the "repair program" option. None of that has worked. Does anyone have a solution for me? Or absent that, do you know of another program I could get that would do most of the same things (easily stitch panoramas, crop, red eye, all the unsusal photo loveliness, organize) so I can either way be done with this crap? Thanks for your input

Hey guys. My bad timing has resulted in my 4 person household being Internet-less for 4 days while we switch ISP's. This wouldn't be a big problem normally but one of my roommates has no phone and just skypes on his iPod touch to stay connected to people. I want to tether my iPhone 4 to the wifi so that he's not inconvenienced any more than he needs to be. I have a good grasp on this kind thing but I'm not at home and I figured I'd ask you guys before I started tinkering to save me some time figuring this out. I have: 1 iPhone 4 with a data plan 1 wireless N router (ASUS, not sure of model) 1 netbook (eeepc running ubuntu 10.04) 1 desktop (vista ultimate 64 bit) The necessary cables and knowledge to plug em in. Any advice and pitfalls would be much appreciated. Thanks. [b]

This happened to my friend just yesterday (Friday). He was having trouble loading youtube videos on his windows 8 desktop, so he called TWC about the issue and they said a technician would be sent out 2 days later (Sunday). Several hours later, he gets a call from TWC and it's a "Tech specialist" or something like that to guide him though fixing the issue, so he trusts following her instructions. After asking what system he is using, she has him uninstall google chrome and go to filehippo.com (his comp is being fixed right now, so don't know the exact url) to download google chrome. This would be a red flag, but since she was a tech specialist, he trusted following her instructions. Now once he downloaded this "google chrome" file, a bunch of viruses were downloaded to the computer (Sparta was the only program I recall). Becoming frustrated, he decided to terminate the call with this lady (thinking it may have been a scam or something) and call TWC customer service dept. As soon as he reaches someone in customer service, the first thing he asks is for the last time anyone from TWC contracted him and what that was about. The agent told him that it was a few minutes prior, and about fixing the issue with google chrome (confirming that it wasn't some other person/company). So,

You can find the first thread here- I ended up talking to a woman named Melissa who was very nice and sincerely tried to help with my problem. She said she agreed that I should be eligible for the offer based on the fine print and checked to make sure I was. Her supervisor agreed but said that feedback on the offer had been shaky and that I would still likely be declined. Melissa agreed that this was wrong and put a request in to have an exception made for me. I have included only the ending to that conversation which basically sums up the first part of the conversation. I only included this part to keep the video much shorter. The majority of the video is the conversation I had with a Time Warner rep that actually called me in the middle of my conversation with Melissa. It's pretty straightforward. Here it is-

Long story short, Verizon is trying to cut my international unlimited data plan, using lingo in a newer/updated ToS. I know what they're referencing wasn't in the ToS when I signed up, otherwise I never would have, as the service would've been useless. I need a copy of the ToS from around the time I signed up (Jan '11) to justify getting grandfathered into my current plan, at least for the rest of my contract. I'm in the military, and currently stationed overseas, and it's seriously going to suck balls if I lose my service. I rely on this to keep in touch with my family back home. The only way to avoid getting cut Aug 1 is to find this. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Yeah, I sorta pulled the stationed overseas military card. Sorry about that. I'm desperate. =\

Hi, I compared the language content of Comcast posts and comments to Non-Comcasts posts and comments from r/technology. This may inform us as to whether individuals who engage in Comcast discussion are different than those who engage in other discussions in r/technology. Although the analysis is basic, here are my methods and results: To analyze the content of posts, it was decided a priori to copy 1) the original title from the OP, 2) the post text by the OP, and 3) the top 3 most upvoted main comments, and then, even if they were in the same thread, the 3 top sub-comments following each of the main comments. For the Comcast condition, I took the sample from the three most popular Comcast posts. For the control condition, I took the three most popular non-Comcast posts. All posts and comments were recorded within 30 minutes of each other. The copying of comments and posts did not include a) usernames, b) timestamps, or c) the Reddit links following posts (e.g. "save", "report"). Full post and comment content was copied, including emoticons, URL’s, slang, and other non-English aspects. However, quoted content was not copied. This information was processed in terms of a variety of factors, including number of sentences, words per sentence, characters per word, and writing level indexes. The writing level indexes can be interpreted as follows: Flesch Reading Ease: 60-70 is 9th grade writing level, 50 is high school graduate level, and <=30 is college level. Fog: 5 = readable; 10 = hard; 15 = advanced; 20 = very difficult Flesch-Kincaid Grade: The average grade level of the student that can produce the writing. Unfortunately I couldn’t do a probability analysis to determine how likely it is that one set of users is different than the other in terms of language content. With a lot of time, I could; that said, the sample is large enough that minor differences actually indicate real differences. The results of the analysis are as follows: Comcast: Sentences: 74 Words in a sentence: 15 Characters per word: 4.4 Flesch Reading: 76.68 (very simple English) Fog: 8.9 (readable-hard) Flesch-Kincaid: 6.3 grade level Non-Comcast: Sentences: 146 Words per sentence: 13.5 Characters per word: 4.4 Flesch Reading: 71.43 (very simple English) Fog: 7.7 (readable-hard) Flesch-Kincaid: 5.3 grade level

This is a technology post, bear with me... My father is an AVID republican and lives in the US. I live in the UK and would describe my political views as mainly being influenced by Robert Anton Wilson. We don't see eye to eye on many aspects of politics. Like a lot of republicans he mainly gets his news from a handful of sites and Faux news. He is coming over sometime in the next few weeks and I see this as a time for some tech-based trolling. My initial thoughts were to rig the DNS on my network to fail for right wing news sites, but then I expanded this to redirecting these through a proxy to a.n.other site. Then I thought about convincing him the that UK had recently enacted a law which forbade biased news sites from portraying themselves as news and had banned all traffic to them or put a redirect in to a UK government page, or some kind of [ternet]( system. My networking knowledge is fairly advanced so I can fuck with the DNS, set up websites and proxies to rewrite the new sites. I am after ideas as to what I could do and a list of right-wing websites I should do it for. I'm not up for doing a redirect to lemonparty or anything similar. I would prefer something which would make him think a little bit and not just spout the usual republicrap. Thanks in advance

Hi everyone! Well, things have taken an interesting turn. Kickstarter has officially suspended the Anonabox campaign. I guess it’s the best for everyone. The device wasn’t what they were advertising, from hardware to software… but more importantly, it didn’t provide “anonymity” and “privacy” as they claimed due poorly patched up software they used (I’m referring to their “expertise” of putting together scripts and packages not the quality of the software they used / stole). So, now what? Anonabox gave high hopes to people, and now a lot of them are disappointed. We’ll bellow you’ll find guidelines on how to build your own device or buy pre made one. But first, let’s take time to actually explain people what Tor on mini router does. A common misconception of Anonabox backers was that people wanted to use it for daily surfing the web, as if their surfing traffic would be invisible to the world. Wrong! Even if Anonabox was delivered, and with all the CORRECT security configuration, most of people would quickly find it DEAD slow and majority of social sites would NOT WORK (and it would beat the purpose of using a Tor device on Facebook). So we first have to make a difference between anonymity and privacy. ANONYMITY If you’re trying to be completely anonymous online, I have bad news for you, it’s not going to go that easy and it cannot happen with device that promises it so easy that's just plug and play. Let’s take for an example Anonabox, in case it was delivered to you (we’re also assuming that device is not delivered worthless but instead configured to match a security guidelines). What’s the first thing most of people would do? They would plug their router or even ISP modem in it. Guess what, you’ve just gave your unique MAC address to your ISP. Considering the fact that Anonabox was heavily misconfigured, if you were to leak your MAC address somewhere in the wild, you could be backtracked. Another example about anonymity. Let’s again assume Anonabox got funded and you backed it or ordered it. Let’s stop for a second and realise that you’ve just ordered a device that's supposedly going to “anonymize” you and you’ve just paid for it with your credit card on YOUR name. It kinda beats the purpose of buying a device which will you use for reporting from protests, sending data about your corrupted government when you just gave your name and address to company that provides the device. You gave your name to the company that you cannot verify it’s 100% secure, even if this controversy wasn’t raised, this would be an issue. See what I’m aiming at? One more example about anonymity. Another fictional situation that almost was possible. The Anonabox guy and his helpers put their name to the project. That means that every single person knew about who they were, their whereabouts and how to contact them. One of the commenter on Anonabox Kickstarter comment section was so devoted about lying and deceiving for his buddy August that he got doxxed (someone revealed his name, address, phone number, his family photos). Now if someone sitting in front of computer managed to do that, how long do you think it would take to a government or even local mobster to get in touch with them? Since they made their contact info public, any malicious entity on this earth could have found them and forced on giving up details about how to control the device maliciously (thank goodness, in Anonabox case they wouldn’t have to find them, they would just use Reddit and Twitter, haha /s). As you can see, it would be extremely easy for anyone to threaten them and their project. Additionally, just to make it clear, governments are more careful (sometimes) so they would just intercept a package and plant their backdoor every time some person of interest would order it (since they do have access to your banking and NSA has been caught doing that). Even more, since devices originate from China, nobody would be able to stop Chinese government of doing the same even before the devices got to the Ananabox guys. Only TRUE way to achieve full anonymity is first not use projects like Anonabox or the plethora of others that will be appearing on Kickstarter soon, fixing Anonabox mistakes. Secondly, if you are serious, you must build your own device. Further in the text you’ll find devices that have great support for OpenWRT and Tor, but even then, if you goal is total anonymity take precautions. It’s better to get a supported “3G router” (devices listed below) in your local store, paid with cash and then flashed OpenWRT by yourself on it. Just so you know, I’m talking about FULL paranoid scenario, if you’re just for privacy continue reading the next point. The full paranoid scenario would include building your own device, using it for let’s say sending info to Wikileaks about some corruption scandal in your country and then… DESTROYING THE DEVICE. Yup, you need to destroy the evidence in case you get caught. Not Tor, not OpenWRT or any other device is 100% secure. You’re better of using carrier pigeons than trusting your life to some piece of plastic if you’re going to use the same device inappropriately. The point of full anonymity is not to get caught, and if you’re having some important information that you want to share, chances there are people that want to stop you from doing it. PRIVACY Ok, now that I’ve explained what's anonymity let’s talk about privacy. Privacy on the web can be easily achieved by using a verified VPN provider. That way you will be able to “tunnel” your internet activity to VPN provider servers, bypassing your local network, public wifi and ISP. But it’s not 100% secure, nothing is, but it’s the closest you can get to privacy and FAST enough to use it on daily basis. VPN providers are nowadays fast as your internet connection, so you won’t have problem with speed. So, if you’re more for privacy than anonymity, you want to get any of devices below and configure the VPN connection on them. You also need to have monthly subscription from a VPN provider. Most of them cost 5$ a month. Further in the text you will find what you need for achieving privacy. TorrentFreak provides always-up-to-date list with serious VPN providers GUIDELINES FOR BUILDING YOUR OWN DEVICE. DO NOT BE AFRAID OF FAILURE, IT IS NOT SCARY AS IT SEEMS! A lot of people will focus on getting the exact device Anonabox planned to use. It will probably work, since the device is a clone of TP-Link MR3020 with just extra network port. But it’s not well supported as the following devices. TP-Link MR3020 This device is has a great OpenWRT support! It comes with TP-Link firmware which can be upgraded to OpenWRT. Guides and detail specification are here MR3020 is also fully supported by the Grugq Portal which is what Anonabox guys used without crediting @thegrugq TP-Link TL-WR703N - Unfortunately, there’s no more webpage of this model, it appears that TP-Link discontinued the production of this model and replaced it with WR702N which has too little of memory for OpenWRT. But you can still buy it on eBay or Amazon (and sold by TP Link officially, which is weird, maybe their website is just down at the time of this writing). OpenWRT has also great support for TL-WR703N, you can even find RAM & ROM upgrade for it on eBay by user SLboat. The Portal from The Grugq also supports it There are also other TP-Link models like MR11U and MR3040 which are supported by OpenWRT and The Portal from Grugq, but I would like to focus on the third device that has out-of-the-box installed OpenWRT. GL-iNet - GL-iNet is perfect example how manufacturer should sell these devices. The device has OpenWRT preinstalled and has support for Tor (they even made official Tor image for it). OpenWRT pages of GL-iNet GL-iNet Tor firmware for download here (this is actually their blog, since the separate posts can be linked) - Since Gl-iNet isn’t that famous, I suggest all security experts to analyze and audit it. Please report any issues. Now, above listed devices are “3G routers” that can be configured for using OpenWRT and Tor, but what about Raspbery Pi? Well yeah, you can use Raspberry Pi for such intent as well! If you’re interested in building your own Tor device, just use the following: Order Raspberry Pi from your favourite source. eBay, Amazon or from Raspberry Pi resellers. The Grugq portal is also available for Raspbery Pi, neatly called PORTALofPi. Currently, there’s no guide on their github, but if you’re technically skilled just run build.sh on Raspberry Pi running Arch Linux. I also hear that there is new version of Portal coming out soon. Adafruit Onion Pi - (currently out of stock) They offer Raspberry Pi pack with a cool Onion Pi case but WITHOUT a sticker in the photo (yea, I know). They DO NOT have Tor preinstalled but offer a nice guide to do it yourself here SafePlug - This device I did not had a chance to use, but it’s being mentioned a lot in the community. It appears to have preinstalled Tor and provides actual plug and play device. WARNING, there is a security concern about the device, read about it here UnJailPi - Now this is the device that is not yet released, but is a project worth funding. A credible project, chosen as a semi-finalist of Hackaday prize contest! It's also important to note that the wording of the UnJailPi project and probably the idea itself was stolen by Anonabox! The above mentioned devices can be used for anonymity and privacy. If you want anonymity use Tor, if you just want to hide your traffic from your ISP, use the above devices with VPN. IF YOU SET UP ANY DEVICE WITH OpenWRT (or Raspberry Pi) CHANGE THE MAC ADDRESS. Majority of VPN providers listed here provide functional and easy guides for setting up OpenVPN on your OpenWRT device. I’m intentionally not listing any of them so I don’t get called out for free advertising. You can easily configure any OpenWRT device with LuCi (GUI) installed with OpenWRT So that’s about it, I hope I cleared things up for you. IMPORTANT, if I missed or wrote something wrong, let me know and I’ll fix it. Also feel free to provide more supported devices. Thanks everyone for reading! Please donate to OpenWRT and Tor! edit: updated article with UnJailPi EDIT:

I am happy to see the slowdown was a such a huge success. Here's my thoughts on where we should be taking this now. Rather, where those companies that thought they owned the internet should be going. All of these companies that think they have a right to say what goes on the internet need to stop being so greedy. If they want more internet to push their goals, why don't they build it. All of these companies have put so much money into lobbying and trying to force people with little money to pay more for less. What if they put that money into networking? I don't have numbers and I'm not going to sit around and spend days making a beautiful infographic for front page glory. This is a thought experiment. Think about the amount of money it takes to run television ads, the money it takes to lobby for these ridiculous campaigns. How is it that financial officers can reason putting this much money into gambles? That's what funding a campaign is, if we are going to be honest about it. You pay a bunch of people, in essential a bribe, to do what you want. There is no guarantee. There are no laws that say, "If you accept money from a company, you must do what they want." They sink millions into this. Wouldn't someone who studied finance understand the risk they are taking and find a better alternative to put that money into creating? It seems to me that building a network isn't the most expensive thing in the world. Small municipalities have created their own networks. Shouldn't Fortune ### companies have enough money to extend networks. If a company really has the desire to own more "pipes" for more internet traffic where they set the priorities, shouldn't they just lay some? I'm not saying they need to create a whole new world wide web. That would be ridiculous, though, not impossible (especially if they teamed up). What I am saying is, if a company sees that they are sending a lot of traffic over a certain hop that gets bogged down from time to time, why not put money into adding their own private hop adjacent to that. The internet is extremely versatile. I'm sure a top tier provider would have no issues with a company saying, "Hey, when traffic from my customers gets to this area in your network, send it out over our new pipe that we actually own, then bring it back in over here." That's a massive win/win scenario. It would then leave the internet that was created to be open, open. While simultaneously, creating what they are fighting for, an "internet" that is restricted to only their traffic where they can float freely along at whatever speed they paid to create.^1 Obviously there are going to be complications, and their are potential downfalls. I haven't spent years in these fields and I haven't spent weeks ironing out the details. This is just a start. Since apparently all the people running these campaigns are extremely ignorant and can't come up with ideas of their own, why not help them. Let's be the bigger person. Let's not just say, "F*ck you guys, that's not allowed you can't possibly think you can do this to us, go away and never return." Let's say, "Listen guys, that's not fair, their are other options." Let's start listing them for them. After all, it's not like all of their services are useless things that we hate. They got big because people liked them and used them. Let's help them out. They obviously feel cornered in their ignorance. If you corner an animal and it starts showing you it's teeth, you either kill it (because you were trying to in the first place, which I don't think we were/are), or you trap it, and set it free somewhere where it's dominant nature is less threatening to society. I think we have successfully cornered them. That's why they are lashing out with these ridiculous campaigns. Now, I think we almost have them in the bag. Let plan our release before we seal it up and start moving. ^1 - This is a really wide topic in itself. Just some additional thought I had about this that would take away from the main point. - If companies were spending money on creating their own networks, they could then charge others to use their pipes. I'm sure they would see this as a great goal for the future. Ideally, once they have had a hand in running the networks and begin to see what it really costs and how useful it really is, they should get more reasonable with it. If municipalities are creating networks at the same pace the need (demand) for this would be much lower. Therefore, they wouldn't be able to charge outrageous sums to use it. People would say, "That's ok, we have this and it's working just fine." They would have to lower prices to a point were people say something more along the lines of, "Hey, wow, that's a really great service you are offering to us, it's quite a bit better than what we have right now (since they took time to create a sturdy backbone), and you are offering it to us at a reasonable cost. I think we will gladly pay you a little to take stress of our network, sure we will watch ads when our network is slow and resorting to yours, just as long as they go away when it's not peek internet time and we are back on the good old (the current network lines) trusty internet."

I do not have access to iCloud, as I don't own any apple products at this time so i have decided to review the main backup methods i use. I have tested the following 3 Platforms that I use. DropBox Google+ and Google Drive Facebook Added: Microsoft One Drive Copy These all sync photos between my phone and their cloud services. Disclamer: Now I am testing is the ability to access my private images that have been synced without signing in. So this isn't hacking per say but trying to access the files directly on the server without signing in and going through the users account. (Note: All of these images are not shared in any way, and are set to private) First, Facebook: (Venerable)Wall post: (Wall Post Link) (Direct Link) Here you can see the direct link to the image but not the wall post link, no matter the privacy settings of the post. (Venerable)Synced Photos: Non direct link only works for the user. (Synced Photo - Direct) Once again you can see the private image. Now, Google + and Google Drive: (Venerable)Google + (Wall Post Link) (Direct Link) With google + you cannot see the Primary links but you can see the secondary (Questionable)Google Drive (Primary Link) (Direct Link) You can view it directly for a while but it appears that over time they change the hosting name (Secure)DropBox: (Direct link) It doesn't work! Dropbox uses some form of authentication to validate access. (Have to look more in depth on this) (Secure)Copy: (Primary Link) (Direct Link) Directs you to a error page when trying to directly view the content. (Secure)Microsoft One Drive: (Primary Link) (Direct Link) Requires you to sign in to view the content

This died completely over at r/apple, and most likely will here, but its annoying me the amount of rabid speculation and little investigation that happened. Apart from hunting the mysterious person known as 4chan, the other one Golden line heard repeatedly over the last few days is at best ill-researched, at worst just plain wrong. For everyone saying that 2FA is the golden bullet. It is, provided that someone like Apple and others don't half arse the implementation Lets start [here.]( > It requires you to verify your identity using one of your devices before you can take any of these actions: > * Sign in to My Apple ID to manage your account > * Make an iTunes, App Store, or iBooks Store purchase from a new device > * Get Apple ID related support from Apple" Now in there you'll notice two major elements missing. Attach a new device to an iCloud account Log in to icloud.com (For those precious few who I have seen comments on, the first covers restoring a backup of a current device to another device for the sake of brevity we'll call that an attachment) So here's the rub for everyone screaming like 2FA is the solution and all these people would have been protected. By admission [here]( the attack was a combination of biographical security questions and weak passwords. So we chalk that up to the old PEBKAC error this is hard to overcome. Moot point, people and passwords suck, something better etc.. etc.. But having this information available to an attacker is the same as having full access to all data on the account. Sure I can't change the password on the account, but who cares at that point. I can see your nether regions 2FA might be the golden bullet, but Apple still have a fucked up implementation. As probabilistically unlikely as it is, many of the effected wouldn't have it enabled at all even if it did work, the first fault still lies with Apple here for all accounts on iCloud.com This has been pointed out before too. [Here](

I realize that Macs are overpriced for what you get. But I also enjoy having one of the best looking laptops on the market, along with one that has tiny quirks such as not having to worry about driver updates and magstrip power cords. I'm not enough of a geek to care about how "closed source" Apple is. It is also nice to never have to worry about viruses or spyware. Sure that might change in the future, but right now it relieves me not to have to worry about that kind of stuff. I also have found Macbook Pro trackpads to be significantly better than any others on the market. Also Also, the 8 hour battery is convenient when I don't want to carry extra batteries with me (the battery replacement cost is the same as another battery would cost for any other laptop)

This is what I email (I sent this for my SO for a college assignment) Dear Representative David Jolly, I am sending this email to urge you to please allow the newly passed Net Neutrality guidelines to be passed by the US House of Representatives. This agreement is a large step in our country to allow for fair access to the internet. Per a Huffing Post online article, the US is ranked #9 in the world in average broadband speeds, while paying a large premium for these services. Allowing internet providers to charge for higher demand websites should NOT be allowed by the US government. All people who access the internet should be able to do it freely and not have a Telco providers be able to restrict which websites are accessed and placed in internet "fast lanes". Also, pricing has become a huge issue with current internet providers in the US today, per HuffingtonPost.com, Verizon offers FioS service at 500Mbit download speed for 310 dollars/ month, while in Hong Kong, and the price for the SAME speed is only 25 dollars/month. In addition to Hong Kong, in Seoul (The capital of South Korea) they pay $30/month for that same 500Mbit download speed. The question I propose to you, Mr. Representative, is why in the US, it is seemingly ok for companies to price gouge its customers for access to the World Wide Web? Per the FreePress.net, "On Feb. 26, the FCC voted to define broadband as what we all know it is — a connection to the outside world that is merely faster than the phone lines we used to use for dial-up access, phone calls and faxes." Please allow this to take effect, as it will have a profound effect on the future way that Americans access the internet. If this is the "land of the free", why should citizens be forced to pay more to visit higher traffic websites? Also, per the PBS, the American Government was duped into providing up to 200 BILLION (yes, with a B!) in money to the telecommunications companies to gain higher profits while NOT upgrading the current infrastructure. Per PBS' article, "Over the decade from 1994-2004 the major telephone companies profited from higher phone rates paid by all of us, accelerated depreciation on their networks, and direct tax credits an average of $2,000 per subscriber for which the companies delivered precisely nothing in terms of service to customers. That's $200 billion with nothing to be shown for it." [By Robert X. Cringely]. This is basically a slap in the face to the Government as well as the citizens, and should not be allowed. Again, please allow this act to be passed into a bill, so the US may improve its world standing in the broadband internet segment, which will do nothing but help the future of this great country. In the end, Mr. Jolly, I would like feedback on your view to Net Neutrality, as well as your decision as to if you support the new regulations under Title II or not. Cringely, R. (2007, August 7). The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen. Retrieved March 9, 2015, from Net Neutrality: What You Need to Know Now. (2014, May 1). Retrieved March 9, 2015, from Isaacson, B. (2014, July 24). U.S. Internet Speed Slows Compared To Other Countries: Report. Retrieved March 9, 2015, from And this is the response from him: April 6, 2015 Dear Ms. Durig, Knowing of your interest in the current debate on net neutrality, I wanted to update you on recent actions taken by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which allow the agency to regulate the internet as a Title II telecommunication service, commonly referred to as a "common carrier." On February 26, the FCC voted 3-2 to regulate the internet as a telecommunications utility using a law from 1934. As a Title II common carrier, the internet will be regulated under the Communications Act of 1934, which brings with it onerous regulations that are 81 years old. I strongly disagree with this decision, as it will hamper the innovation of the internet by regulating it as a utility. The FCC arrived at this decision after prior attempts to regulate the internet failed beneath judicial scrutiny. Both in 2010 and 2014, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down similar regulations, which used clauses under the Title I provisions. Having failed to enforce net neutrality rules under a less regulated Title I information service, the FCC moved to utilize the more restrictive regulatory framework of Title II to accomplish the same objective. Similar to the previous two rulings, this decision is also expected to be mired in judicial proceedings. Americans have become accustomed to the wealth of information and entertainment that the internet provides them, and rightfully voice their concerns when this status quo becomes threatened. The FCC's most recent ruling establishes regulations that were never meant to be placed upon a service like the internet, using a framework from a time when such a service was inconceivable. We can do better. Congress must insert itself into this debate and create a modern legal structure that preserves the internet as it is and allows for continued innovation in this important sector of our economy. The creation of the internet sparked a transformative technological revolution- one which our society only gets to witness every hundred years. While we are still in the early stages of developing the internet and utilizing its promise, I am strongly concerned that the FCC's ruling to regulate it as a utility will encumber and stifle further innovative efforts. Such a restriction will restrict the ability to further transform our economy and hamper the efforts to provide access to information for every American. As such, I support the consumer protections offered by the concept of net neutrality, but I only support a net neutrality framework that has been authorized by Congress, not through including the internet in an eight decades old statute which limits its infinite potential by regulating it as a utility. I am committed to working with my colleagues to evaluate the balanced interests of all sides of this issue and develop a legislative solution that is appropriately tailored to the 21st Century. I have taken the liberty of sharing your thoughts with my colleagues on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over legislation dealing with net neutrality. I will be sure to continue to update you on any legislative updates. Thank you again for taking the time to contact me. It is my hope that you will continue to keep me apprised of your interest in legislative issues important to you. Lastly, please visit my website located at jolly.house.gov and consider signing up for my weekly e-newsletter, which provides updates on issues in Congress. [Proof of response from Rep David Jolly](

The hack of an NSA malware staging server is not unprecedented, but the publication of the take is. Here's what you need to know: (1/x)]( [1) NSA traces and targets malware C2 servers in a practice called Counter Computer Network Exploitation, or CCNE. So do our rivals.]( [2) NSA is often lurking undetected for years on the C2 and ORBs (proxy hops) of state hackers. This is how we follow their operations.]( [3) This is how we steal their rivals' hacking tools and reverse-engineer them to create "fingerprints" to help us detect them in the future.]( [4) Here's where it gets interesting: the NSA is not made of magic. Our rivals do the same thing to us -- and occasionally succeed.]( [5) Knowing this, NSA's hackers (TAO) are told not to leave their hack tools ("binaries") on the server after an op. But people get lazy.]( [6) What's new? NSA malware staging servers getting hacked by a rival is not new. A rival publicly demonstrating they have done so is.]( [7) Why did they do it? No one knows, but I suspect this is more diplomacy than intelligence, related to the escalation around the DNC hack.]( [8) Circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility. Here's why that is significant:]( [9) This leak is likely a warning that someone can prove US responsibility for any attacks that originated from this malware server.]( [10) That could have significant foreign policy consequences. Particularly if any of those operations targeted US allies.]( [11) Particularly if any of those operations targeted elections.]( [12) Accordingly, this may be an effort to influence the calculus of decision-makers wondering how sharply to respond to the DNC hacks.]( [13)

as everyone knows, Iphone tracks your movements without letting you know. Well, about 60 minutes ago, my boss (he's a wealthy guy running a shipping conglomerate) received a phone call from his wife :) We can always tell when his wife (she was ex-head of our IT division LMAO!!) calls because she is the only person he talks super softly to/ he has a sort of special voice for her. so she turns up at the office and they are all sort of chummy and then they start discussing his Iphone which is on the table! and then she grabs it and starts flipping through it. My boss is a big guy but he's soft as a lamb around her. Then she gently nudges him aside and plugs the Iphone into his laptop. I think he suspects nothing because he's sort of smiling and looking at other files. THEN SHE POINTS HIM TO A MAP OF HIS MOVEMENTS!!! LMAO!!! (our boss has a lot of secret girlfriends and since he is rich can make up all sorts of excuses!! he rarely brings them to the office but basically visits them on round clandestine trips!) lololol well her suited lawyers are now in the building!! LOLO END OF THEIR MARRIAGE!!!!! SOOO FUNNY!!! (it doesn't really hurt him he has 2 kids by her. we all know her personality. she will tear his assets apart) hehehee.... anyway just wanted to post this cos it is sooo funny lololol

Before I start, here are some pictures. So, I'm going to break this into 6 pieces, and discuss each of them. They are: ease of use, cost, usability, size, batteries, opinion. Let's get started. 1: Ease of use The button is a dash to set up. Open the amazon app, connect it to your WiFi, and get to pressing. Once it's set up, you'll be able to press it only if there is no current order for that item (unless you turn multiple ordering on). For some of the buttons (I'll use gatorade as an example), you can choose your flavor, and then upon pressing the button, it will order that specific item. You can't have the button order anything on Amazon, though. The selection of items only relates to the brand, and it doesn't let you choose any Gatorade product, just the ones that Amazon says that you can use. 2: Cost The button is $5, and only available to Prime members. It won't let non-Prime members order one. The problem with spending $5 is that you're spending that money for the convience. You could just as easily bookmark the "[Buy Now]( button, and use that. While I do wish that after 5 or so orders with the button, they would credit $5 to your account, it's not a bad price, overall. 3: Usability The button only does one thing . It orders a specific item, from the brand on the button, instantly. The button is not hard to use, per se , but it definitely is too easy to accidentally press, and then have 6 bottles of Gatorade show up at your door in two days. It will send you a notification every time the button is pressed, whether it orders something or not , so that helps a lot. It's also pretty easy to cancel your order from that notification. 4: Size It looks pretty small in this is a little bigger than my average-sized thumb pad, so it's not that bad . It's easy to put in the back of a closet because the button is recessed a bit , so it won't get pressed by stuff hitting it. While I wouldn't put it on the front of my washer or Keurig, I might put it in my detergent cabinet, or my K-Cup drawer.** 5: Batteries It has no battery charger, and no way to charge them. On the little instruction manual it says that the battery can't be recharged, and that if you call Amazon, they'll send you a brand new one, with a new battery. It's like having unchangeable duracells. 6: My final opinion If you have $5 lying around, use at least one of the products available on a button regularly, and have Prime it's totally worth it. It's also worth giving it a shot if you like to try Amazon's new tech out. However, while the products you can order are well priced, there's just not a great selection of the buttons yet . I would either wait for a great hack, or just pass. Final score: 7.2/10

I looked around for a tutorial, and the only one I found seems to use a service that no longer exists for its basis. I'm interesting in doing a DIY "Caller ID Spoofing" through use of some software that I may or may not have to write things for, because I find having to pay for something like that stupid. Has anyone else written anything or found a way to make this work? Thanks. (Usage not for gay shit.)

Microsoft just did a better job of clarifying the whole question for free upgrades for the "Insider Preview" tester. The

An audiophile friend lent me a spare system, and one idle day I plugged in my G5 iPod from the headphone jack and cursed 'the crappy mp3s', they were just terrible. But when I played a CD burned from the same mp3s the music sounded great, amazingly good ... hmm. I found an iPod line-out adapter that takes a low-level signal from the docking connector, $6 from DealExtreme ... and lo, from the line-out the iPod sounded as good as the CD. What was going on ... why was the iPod line-out so good, and the headphone output so bad? The answer is, the incredibly crappy iPod headphone amps! Why did they build such a superb device, then use such awful heaphone amps? I figured, if I can take a line-out from the docking connector and use an external headphone amp, I could really boost the audio quality. I went with the Fiio E5, also at DealExtreme, the size of a thick book of matches, built-in LiPo batt, 10 hrs real-world runtime, electronic volume, bass boost, mini-USB for charging ... $18!! Worth the money? What a difference! A/B'ing the iPod headphone jack against lineout-into-Fiio is like freeing the music from a cage, imaging spreads out twice as big, detail opens up ... I expected a difference but nothing like this. I use $80 Comply earphones so on cheap phones your mileage might vary, but for a total investment of $25 this was a revelation (disclaimer, no association with any company other than a satisfied customer.)

first, a little background. 26/m/bay area with a tech fetish. so i wasn't interested in it until i heard about it playing netflix, so i went down to the apple store to check it out. hella people were there checkin it out an shit and so i asked the guard to help me look for one. when the first one opened up the two guards were very eager to alert me to it, and as i walked over someone else got to it, no big deal. so then the guard dude told me he would get the next one for me. so when the next one opened up a little girl came along and dude snatched it away from her. LOL! anyway, the second i held it i realized it was way to heavy, like.... if the second one is a pound then cool. anyway, i asked guard dude about it playing netflix, he was like -yes, it does to that- and so i asked what's up with it, dude said -that's OUR ipad, you cannot download anything to it- i poked around on it a little, didn't even bother to surf the interwebs. so.. verdict: the second one might be tight, but that's a year away right? i might just have to check out the google thang

Posting on an alt account so my main doesn't get any karma for this. Hello /r/technology, I recently purchased the domain name learntogoogle.it, intending to build a fun [lmgtfy]( or [Just Google It]( -esque site. But I was thinking that it might be more useful to build a community help site. For instance, the site could hold a wiki to show people how to optimize their searches, code examples for Google APIs, a feed of recent Google news, and so forth. Basically, (and here is the

Over the past few months /r/technology has undergone many changes. However, one issue that is still prevalent is the ability for hot-button issues to overtake the technology frontpage. We've seen this in the past with Net Neutrality, Verizon, Tesla, and most recently, Comcast. While these topics do involve and impact technology in some way, there are many other articles and discussions that are relevant to technology that may get pushed out of sight. We have had many internal discussions on this and are taking steps to make the frontpage more enjoyable for users that may not be interested those specific topics. Today we've added a no comcast button to the sidebar. If you are uninterested in Comcast stories, feel free to browse as it is free of all comcast submissions. We plan to continue to monitor these hot button issues so there will always be an avenue to hide them if you prefer. If you have any thoughts on this change, we'd be happy to hear your feedback in the comments. Rule 3 After many discussions among us moderators and with the /r/technology community, we have changed rule 3 very slightly. Originally, submissions needed to include the exact title that appears on the article. However, this doesn't always fully reflect what's in the article. We have now changed it to this: >Link submissions should use the article's title or a quote describing its content. They must be free of personal opinion and accurately represent the content of the article. Posts that fail to meet these criteria may be removed at moderator discretion. The

I was just thinking the other day about how teens of the 2000s are going to have to introduce their kids to the technology that we're all so familiar with nowadays and it got me thinking... How are we as the Internet Generation going to introduce our kids to technologies like Reddit, Facebook, Youtube, Cell Phones, iPods (and iTunes for that matter) or even things like Limewire and Bittorrent. What will your rules be about technology? At what age will you let your kids have a cell phone or a facebook page? Will you let your kids post videos on youtube or pirate music from limewire? What will you tell them about all of these things that we're just now learning how to use? (

I probably submitted this to the wrong subreddit, thinking I'd actually get any sane responses. What do you think about this? Copying the

Comcast Trolls America Part 2 - Comcast Fees & Collections: A disturbing practice Comcastration: Financial castration suffered at the hands of Comcast. Can also be used as a verb: “I can’t make my rent this month because I just got Comcastrated by $600 in bogus charges.” During the summer of 2014, when massive media attention highlighted how harrowing it can be for consumers to extricate themselves from Comcast, BGR’s Brad Reed quipped: [“Comcast’s brilliant new way to retain subscribers: Refuse to let them cancel”]( Like [Ryan Bock]( [Aaron Spain]( and countless others, I was confronted by a punishing Comcast cancellation process. Even though I had already tried 15 times to get Comcast to address my non-working service, Comcast employees Ashley on 6/24/14 and Melissa on 7/4/14 insisted that if I cancelled my account, I would be charged a $960 Termination Fee. At the time, I didn’t know that Ashley and Melissa were actually “Retention Agents”, expertly trained to carry out Comcast’s evil-genius Refuse-To-Let-Customers-Cancel scheme by which both the customer AND the Retention Agent suffer if and when an account is successfully closed. Three weeks later, Comcast Executive Dave Watson [wrote in a memo to employees]( “I have tremendous admiration for our Retention professionals, who make it easy for customers to choose to stay with Comcast.” In light of my Comcast experiences, I find Watson’s comments to be disturbing. What Dave Watson unsettlingly characterizes as making it “easy for customers to choose to stay with Comcast” is in reality strong-arming consumers with heinous ~$1000 Termination Fees and then promptly delivering their bills to Collections, ravaging credit scores in the process. Dave Watson – Comcast’s Chief Operating Officer - appears grossly unaware of how Comcast operates, or perhaps he is just openly proud of a coercive and reprehensible retention system. Being forced to agree to pay a $960 Termination Fee - for cancelling service that wasn’t working – was beyond demoralizing. The next step in my separation from Comcast was equally disconcerting. As documented in my 8/13/14 [“Comcast’s Notorious Unreturned Equipment Fees”] ( front page Reddit Post, I recorded myself returning all Comcast equipment, I got a signed & dated receipt from a Comcast Tech, I was later charged $360 in unreturned equipment fees, I then spent 115 minutes on the phone unsuccessfully fighting the equipment charges (with Erica on 7/16, Joy on 7/21, and Dawn on 7/22), and then even after all that I received bills in the mail for the $360 in unreturned equipment fees on 7/30 and 8/6. My “Comcast’s Notorious Fees” post generated 5000 comments on Reddit, many of which told accounts that were remarkably similar to my own Comcast Equipment Fees experience. Also noteworthy, [The Full 13 Minute Recording of my Comcast Equipment Return]( suggests that Comcast employees are aware of Comcast’s propensity to wrongly bill for “Unreturned” Equipment AND to send bills to Collections. Point #1: During 10:55 through 12:45 in the recording , Comcast Tech twice suggested the possibility that I might be falsely billed for the TV & Internet equipment, also advising me I should hold on to the TV & Internet equipment receipt. Interestingly, by stark contrast, Comcast Tech felt confident stating that I would not be falsely billed for Home Security equipment: “You don’t need to worry about these [the Home Security Equipment]... that’s all gonna get turned in and just get removed from your account.” Comcast Tech’s statements proved to be dead accurate: I WAS repeatedly billed $360 for “Unreturned” TV & Internet Equipment but I was NOT ever billed any fees for the Home Security Equipment (even though I returned all TV, Internet, and Home Security Equipment at the same time). Point #2: At 6:50 into the recording . During the past year, there have been [more than 160,000 comments about Comcast on Reddit]( The 160,000 comments

Throwaway account. I am a network engineer at a large ISP or hosting company you've probably heard of. I have an inside source at IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Background: IANA has IP addresses. They give out huge blocks of 16 million IP addresses to the Regional Internet Registries (RIR's), which then dole them out inside their region (ARIN for the US and Canada, RIPE for Europe, APNIC for Southeast Asia and Pacific rim, etc). These huge blocks of IPs are commonly referred to as /8's. Once IANA hits 5 /8's, it triggers a doomsday allocation - one /8 to each RIR, and then the ipv4 internet (the internet as you know it) is "full". Each RIR estimates 6-9 months reserve IPs after IANA is out. Anyway,