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Recent Posts

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3551
Well, as long as what you have works for you.  I haven't found anything yet that I can't pay in advance... it's just that their systems don't sometimes keep up with it as a forward payment.   This includes a PO Box... I'm not sure why your post office doesn't let you re-up in advance... mine doesn't care.

Several times, the person was nice, they seemed helpless; "We can't renew a box earlier than 30 days before it's due."

Dunno how to answer that. Maybe some Postal reps in other states hacked/patched the system.
3552
Living Room / Re: Microsoft keeps DNT as default in IE10
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 08, 2012, 01:46 PM »
Try this sentence:

"The fundamental problem faced by Do Not Track (or any other similar privacy mechanism) is that sending a header doesn't do anything in and of itself. Advertisers need to both look for the header and honor it if it shows that the user does not want to be tracked. This is problematic, because it's not actually in advertisers' interest to not track users."

See elsewhere, my Combo Bells are ringing. If some awesome judge backed by an elite defensive sniper team who cannot be bought rules that user generated copyrighted content has to occur *first*(the user click is earlier than any remote site compilation), then, when viewed in a Copyright context such that any user can sue any advertiser, (class, etc, I know), THEN the 3rd tier ad companies will give a damn.

Edit: This post brought to you by Ghostery Blocked 1 of 1 Google Analytics. Exploitation Begins at Home! (Ferengi motto)
3553


It's a little more involved than that.  An example.  I change jobs today.  My new job pays 30 days in arrears, but my old job pays on time.  Let's say that both pay on the first.  Since my pay is time shifted, on 9/1 I'm actually releasing funds from 7/1 (full paycheck from old job).  With that, I pay bills from November, including estimated utilities based on the average for the year.  It doesn't matter that I actually haven't gotten paid from my new job.  It also doesn't matter that I didn't get paid from my old job (except for the 8 days in August).  That money used was already made two months ago.  And is paying bills from two months in the future.  I'd have to (1) not get paid for two months, and then (2) not pay bills for two months for everything to be back to normal.

As a dear family member once said, "we are actively agreeing". Sometimes you can't pay bills forward, that's the same concept I had with the Restricted Funds account - you "Allocate" the money, and it's not there for you to play with at the beach getting ice cream.

I used the US Post as a reason - I was one day early the other day to renew my PO Box. No amount of anything will let me pay that forward. But by shifting that into the Restricted Account, you just burn calendar days until it becomes sensible to pay it. In Accounting methodology, you Accrued it as Pending on 7-31, and transferred funds to the Restricted Account, then you just burn time until it goes (banks work backwards) debit bank credit Postal Fee.

(Edit: I use a REALLY fancy system that involves a triple-switch, but it's just smoke and mirrors to deal with the fact that I never have my Restricted ATM card on me *ever*. So it's just a fancy real-time bank switch per transaction)
3554
Living Room / Re: It's Official: Many DC'ers Are Psychopaths~! :P
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 08, 2012, 01:25 PM »
So do 1-man companies have MORE rights than one man!?

That's an easy question to answer... and the answer is... Yes!  And the 1 man corporation pays less taxes for more benefits, and enjoys more protections.

Ow. Go Go fake Consulting Resume!
3555
Living Room / Re: It's Official: Many DC'ers Are Psychopaths~! :P
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 08, 2012, 12:31 PM »
Corporations are people right?  If the people go on FB and reveal a lot of details of their lives, then should corporations use FB the same way?  i want transparency on revenue, how profits are made, daily activities of employees and CEOs, lifestyle revelations, interests, who are their real friends (Congressmen, etc., not the millions of FB users who click the "like" button, i want to know who corporations are spending weekends with, who they play golf with, who they go to lunch with, all that).


This is actully 5%-10% of my little stress relief post in the Basement. Isn't it amazing that as a "person" you have to give up your first born son (that you haven't had) but the minute you become a Company nobody cares about Alexander Stradihovsky (made up name) and instead they all focus on ILikeYou.com.

So do 1-man companies have MORE rights than one man!?
3556
Living Room / Re: Curiosity Mars rover - live feed from NASA
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 08, 2012, 02:24 AM »
I got trapped for an hour reading Dork Tower after seeing the devastating new comic.
http://www.dorktower...08/DorkTower1098.gif

3557
Living Room / Re: It's Official: Many DC'ers Are Psychopaths~! :P
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 08, 2012, 02:17 AM »
What, you mean spending 20 hours a day imagining the nice pictures I can make with Cody's entrails makes me a psycho? Oh, I get it, if I sign up for Facebook, then I can worship Lord Z and then everything will be better.
3558
Living Room / Re: Curiosity Mars rover - live feed from NASA
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 07, 2012, 10:12 AM »

Why is it so impossibly difficult to manage to stay away from copyright Nazis for just one, brief, fleeting moment? Unbelievable.


Because someone has discovered that Oppression can be sexy in a Skeksi kind of way.
3559
I time-shift my bills, but I actually do it forward.  And then I time-shift my pay back.  I'm currently up to paying my next month's bills at the very least with my prior month's paycheck.  It sounds crazy to do... but I have software that actually lets me (and encourages me) to do so.  Of course, it drives some of my bill people crazy, because their systems aren't set up to keep track of someone who is ahead... I wonder why...  :-\

But it's incredibly freeing.  I don't pay bills on the date when they say I should... I pay them at the time of month when it best fits my schedule.  And I always have leeway if something unexpected comes up.  Some might say that's just savings... but my savings is totally separate.  The paychecks that I have set aside untouched haven't been allocated at all.  Quite hard to effectively explain... but it works.

Not all that tough to do. I pay off my car insurance for the year within about 5 months of the yearly cycle, and then I try to do my yearly savings (or in this case desperation while unemployed!  :o   )  in the summer.

If a vendor's system gets grumpy with "forward paying" you can try a Restricted Funds account. I run a double checking, one of which gets used strictly for certain bills and I don't even have the atm card in my wallet when I go out. So then as you get slack in your paychecks, you just dump money in there, and then just pay off whatever random bill that doesn't like forward pays. (The US Post Office PO Box Renewal fee is a good example.)
3560
Living Room / Re: Michigan Supreme Court Upholds Right to Insult Meter Maids
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 07, 2012, 10:04 AM »
Chops to you 40hz, and such a fine post is one reason I come here. Some of you guys do your homework!

My apologies for the headline, I didn't put any effort trying to re-write it. I did however glance at some of the court's logic and I went with the spirit that while it doesn't make you a nice guy to yell at a meter maid/dude, *the type of ordinance* could in other instances lead to the campus security forces doing other actions that overstep bounds based on whims.
3561

I time shifted shoes once! For a while back in the days, I had a bit of trouble finding shoes that fit right. So one time I found some fun classy looking black steel toed boots that looked almost like loafers, I bought an entire extra pair! So then when the first pair wore out a couple of years later, there was my time shifted pair!  8)
3562
Living Room / Re: Curiosity Mars rover - live feed from NASA
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 07, 2012, 05:02 AM »
Erich von Daniken, is that you?  :o
3563
Living Room / Re: Typing Speed Competition!
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 07, 2012, 05:02 AM »
I was going to make a fake one and try and be funny but I think my real results are amusing enough. I thought I wasn't bad a typing but it seems I must spend most of my time correcting all the mistakes I make.


That's actually how I type in real life, I made a special effort to slow down and go cleaner for the contest.
P.s. How fast does Cody type?
3564

I wonder if this approach can't be extended to other less-obvious domains of life?  What would life be like if one purposefully shifted their entire focus of life back 5 years?

I read that as a bit more than media, don't you?  With that in mind, my comments stand  :P.

Well, there's some great SciFi story material there! I can see the ads now. "Getting old and tired? Annoyed you gained 20 pounds in 5 years? Shift your life back 5 years instantly! Undo that bad marriage!"  :D
3565
Living Room / Re: Curiosity Mars rover - live feed from NASA
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 06, 2012, 11:14 PM »
For those who don't know who they are, they can be found here: http://www.scripps.com

Want to drop them an e-mail, outlining your disgust with their maneuver?  They have a contact us page :)

If anything NASA should sue THEM for copyright infringement, trying to claim copyright and profit from content that NASA released to the public domain.

But of course not, and even if it does the news will never ever broadcast it.

Seriously, the news is so based on sensationalizing every little thing wrong on this planet, that we finally have a huge success in the space program and it get almost completely overlooked. Curiousity is quite likely the largest human built object to ever land on Mars, and yet it only get 10 seconds of screen time while they continue whoring out the Olympics that nobody wants to see anymore or the Election that has turned into a mockery between the two main candidates.

Funny choice of verbs there Seraphim, in other threads, we apparently can't even get the Olympics ... uh... pleasure. Instead we get the marketing shell around the good stuff, like those pole dancers at men's clubs who "don't want to be touched" and "can't imagine why they'd have any crazed men to deal with."
3566
Well, I can see the advantages/benefits of the approach, but there might be a disadvantage or two (2)  ;).
Like dental appointments, maybe?  Or cancer surgery?  Or jury duty?  Granted, that's an extreme, but ...

Under a bit of flair, it looks like this is largely talking about "media entertainment" in general. It doesn't work as well for almost any other category. You can't randomly not do "required" tasks and then decide you're bored and go serve your Jury Duty for the O. J. Simpson case.

So since it's about media consumption, it was easy in the old days for the advertisers and producers, they'd all bicker for the Thursday at Eight slot or whichever night had The Killer Show on it. Now that people are either day-shifting or year-shifting, we're saying that we're making ourselves less valuable to traditional advertising. Hence all the other woes that befall us with the more invasive ads.

3567
Well, I've done my bit of activism in my corners of the net, I'm gonna have to take a break from all this junk for a while. The emotional roller coaster is wearing me out now.
I wonder how many people feel/think the same?
I have a theory that a lot of this nonsense is designed to desensitize people by flooding them with incessant change - you get change-induced fatigue/narcosis and stop fighting it. Even the most stalwart activists could become more malleable, less resistant and more accepting.
This is how Scientology and various other brainwashing cults operate.

It's more than a theory. Great minds and all that, it's been announced as an explicit strategy of theirs. "Keep pummeling them with successive versions and one day they will be too tired to fight back anymore." Sorry to say, for me, they won. (For now.)
3568
Thanks for the notes guys.

In one sense, of the forums I post to, everyone knows the dangers at stake. And per Iain's note, it's absolutely exhausting, except it's not "an act", 'dem evil critters wanted SOPA for what it was, they didn't think 12 moves ahead in any kind of master plan. Rather, there's everything to gain and little to lose to just keep introducing these things, and like me, eventually the energy of the rebels wears out.

A main reason I'm going to take a break soon is that X internet freedom fighters can only do so much, we got the basic word out twice, on SOPA and ACTA, and we're all collectively getting tired and starting to miss the 3rd generation bills. So even if we keep hollering, one day some random FSCKILLA billa (or whatever acronym) bill hits, we'll be living in a Post-______ world.

What we need is some higher grade help, like Judge Posner I mentioned elsewhere, or maybe that new silicon valley corp coalition. We need a signature event that completely turns Copyright on its head by using their own over-extended rules against them, so devastatingly that it re-writes the entire global mood. Then I'll join back in the aftermath cleanup.

But it's getting to where I'm running out of steam in my local life, and if that happens I'll be of no use to the movement 3 years from now with whatever that time frame requires.

Edit: Although I was a low end mediocre player, I am permanently altered by my Magic the Gathering days, and I instinctively look for "News Combos". News outlets, trying to drill out copy as fast as possible, (lately?) seem to have a bad habit of treating each news "object" like it's its own thing, and either via author exhaustion or design, refuse to see what happens if you combine these IP related articles together. What MTG taught me is that even innocent looking (by innocent or malicious design) items can do absolutely devastating things in combination.

So (I'm forgetting now if I posted it here) like the Michigan law student who used a Supreme Court case to bust a local "don't yell at the meter maids" ordinance, my rough vision of these copyright rules is pinging my Combo Bell. Basically, if Copyright Infringements are $175,000 a pop, and Copyrighted Works come into play the *instant* that you create them, then some ballistic fluke backed by big pockets (to bull past the corruption stalling tactics) might be able to argue things that the mouse clicks that the user clicks *and saves locally in some kind of work* might constitute a Creative Work, and then Facebook gets to deal with $175,000 fines *per user* *per day*.

3569

Well, I've done my bit of activism in my corners of the net, I'm gonna have to take a break from all this junk for a while. The emotional roller coaster is wearing me out now.
3570
Living Room / Re: Happy Birthday TRS-80
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 05, 2012, 02:01 PM »

There's also a later model Tandy from the year 1991- it uses an Intel 386 SX CPU with most likely 2MB of RAM. Not sure what all is in it, I'd have to read the tags.
It's still in it's factory packaging, and has never been booted. I got that while working at an old radioshack store cleaning out the back room, it was too old to sell so the guy said I could keep it.

Too old to sell, Ebay here you come!
3571
Living Room / Michigan Supreme Court Upholds Right to Insult Meter Maids
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 05, 2012, 01:58 PM »


http://www.thenewspa...com/news/38/3860.asp
A former Michigan State University (MSU) law student last week beat the system after taking a case arising out of a parking ticket before the state's highest court. Jared Rapp, arguing on his own behalf, convinced the justices that the ordinance used to convict him was unconstitutional.

This is one of those happy outcomes where you know Campus rules are irritating, and this guy apparently put together a perfect case and proved it.   8)
3572
Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Paste As File
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 05, 2012, 01:56 PM »
Awesome!
(You made a small typo (Past As File will remember) so I fixed it before my brain exploded lol)


No No No! I want an app that records my entire past as a file! Gawd knows I don't remember much more than three months tops as it is.   :tellme:
3573
Living Room / Re: Happy Birthday C=64
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 05, 2012, 01:53 PM »
I still have our Commodore 128D that can be started up in C64 mode.  Does that count for anything?  I also still have our Atari 130XE as well.  Both fully work and I still have working software on 5.25 floppies.

+4 for the Commodore 128. It was PERFECTLY situated with a 250% better BASIC against the passage of about 3 years of typical childhood, such that it became my signature machine at 12, and I couldn't really grasp the harder concepts of the C64 at 9.
3574
Living Room / Re: Happy Birthday TRS-80
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 05, 2012, 01:50 PM »

Recalibrating these drives wasn't difficult if you had: a screwdriver, a special 'calibration' floppy disk, and the matching utility software. It was sort of a C=64 power user's rite of passage doing one of these. You had to crack the drive case (and void your warranty) to do it. But it was no harder than setting the dwell on a pre-fuel injection automobile engine. A little practice and a light steady touch were all that were needed. Most of us left the drive cases unscrewed and only elastic banded together after doing a few of those.


Holy Not-Just-Works Batman! I'd call that difficult! And we think our IT problems are bad today!  :o

Edit: The Commodore 64 took over the TRS 80 thread. I'll leave the meaning of that to my betters.  8)
3575
Living Room / Re: Typing Speed Competition!
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 05, 2012, 01:04 PM »
Your score: 259 CPM (that is 52 WPM)

Your score beats or equals 71.28% of all.


Congratulations! You typed all 48 words correctly!
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