Hahaha
At fuddruckers with my dad before taking any him back to the airport. He is attempting to take a picture of me with his LG phone I got him a while ago.
I waited for him to put down the hamburger sandwich. 
I wrote this post with my new phone that has a keyboard while at lunch. Hopefully my old one sells today.
Eric Alterman on Liberalism’s Past, Present and Future from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
In this conversation with Bill Moyers, writer Eric Alterman describes the grand aspirations, ambitions, and historical ironies that prompted him to write his new book The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama. He calls on liberals to regain “the fighting spirit” that characterized Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and to put it in service of new liberal policies for the 21st century. Liberals, he tells Moyers, have overpromised and underperformed, and it’s time once again to make government credible.
BILL MOYERS: So when the proverbial alien from Mars arrives and says, Alterman, how will I know a liberal when I meet one? How do you answer?
ERIC ALTERMAN: You know how you know someone is a liberal? It’s because they believe in the enlightenment. It’s because they believe in reason. It’s because they follow their thoughts to their logical conclusion. And they say, “This is the right thing to do.” Now exactly what policies that leads you to is always changing and always open to argument. But they don’t say, “This is what God told me to do.” They don’t say, “This is what the dialectic of history told me to do.” They say, “This is the right thing to do for the greatest number of people.”
So if there’s one challenge that faces liberalism– liberals today, it is to find a way to revive people’s faith in the ability of government to improve their lives. And that, to me, is the– would be the next chapter of this book.
via Full Show: The Case for Old-School Faith & Politics | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com.
I blog.
They read, and Google search.
I email.
They read those as well. Even after the fact.
I post on medical cannabis forums.
They read those as well.
IPv4 Address: 209.202.94.21
“State Fund is the largest provider of workers’ compensation insurance in California.”
I wrote this blog post you’re reading and then got more traffic, and it was even shared via Microsoft live.com email.
206.202.94.22
And then 45 minutes later…
And then 50 minutes later…
And then via mobile device, possibly while driving?
And then shared via Microsoft Live.com Email…
Yep. Who’s being surveilled here?
How fast is your home Internet in south Orange County, California? Mine is not that fast. Especially after I initially got the DOCSIS 3.0 device, and before Cox decided to reply on my open letter about various issues they cause and bill for yet never enabled.
I pay for the DOCSIS 3.0 Cox Premier Internet plan, which advertised on television as speeds “up to 25mpbs.”
The price for this service is $64.99/month. But it goes on “sale” numerous times of the year, for only new customers, at rates which cause me to wonder about the true profitability of the cable infrastructure which is just shifting bits left, or right, and not creating anything new.
Anyways. Now if I want faster upload speeds, how much will this cost me?
Well, roughly double. They Cox Internet tiers are severely limited in all manner through bandwidth shaping sold to customers as a “boost”, or something which sounds like an enhancement to their crappy service. It’s really just another way to limit perfectly good technology to frustrate knowledgeable customers.
They thoughtfully leave off the download label in all of the Cox marketing material. This is because Cox Internet upload speeds are a measly 271.95 K/s if you are so lucky. This is roughly 2.4mbps if your networking math is fuzzy.
Even then the allocated upload speed is still only going to be 5mbps on the “Ultimate” branded tier. My home router is barely even capable of transferring data and doing network address translation(NAT) at a constant rate over 40mbps. It just seems like such overkill because I want faster upload, not download.
Such baloney.
It’s the known Von Neumann bottleneck architecture implemented as a consumer broadband network.
Bandwidth throttling is the new telephone busy signal.
Not to leave off this thought, but did you see how much extra crap, each tier is provided with, that is 100% useless to me? At least six things which I don’t need from Cox. Webmail, Spamblocker, 10 Email accounts, 50 GB of some proprietary lock-in storage locker service, Nick Jr, ESPN3(Whatever that is.), and finally some Cox Security Suite that I have no use for because I use a UNIX based operating system.
.
Wanted to share some funny health care cartoons and food for thought.
[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/px/status/185873021486120960"]
After eleven years of my own on-going non-sense, it’s safe to say this one comic nails the workers compensation system with the “The Judge will see you now.” blurb by a nurse in the waiting(…) room. It literally takes months, if not years for anything to happen, and even then, the judge most likely not impartial as their previous employer was an insurance company in the revolving door industry.
And of course a television and easy chair piece.
/via washington post.
The EFF has a great new page about patents hindering the innovation inventors and small businesses seek.
Patents may have been created to help encourage innovation, but instead they regularly hinder it. The US Patent Office, overwhelmed and underfunded, issues questionable patents every day. “Patent trolls” buy too many of these patents and then misuse the patent system to shake down companies big and small. Others still use patents to limit competition and impede access to new knowledge, tools, or other innovations.
It’s no wonder that small businesses and individual inventors find it almost impossible to make the patent system work in their favor, often leaving them without any defense against competitors with giant patent arsenals and litigation budgets.
via How Patents Hinder Innovation | Electronic Frontier Foundation.
It’s nice that my TiVo HD with lifetime service supports free over the air broadcasts. This should save me some money every month if I could only receive them. Right? I am still trying to find out.
I emailed the General Manager for where I live to notify them, and Cox that I would like to receive free over the air television signals, and this would require a 30 foot mast, on to which an antenna would be installed.
Aside to my wishes to stop paying Cox Communications for services I am unable to use, I think it would be nice of Cox Communications, and their senior staff in the office of the General Manager, to actually provide a cable card channel listing, guide information, an actual price list, whatever you want to call it to customers in a format which is human readable. You know, like plain text. Those files with .txt extensions.
I would kind of like like to be able to update my 3-plus year old listings, which are not even correct anymore.
UPDATE: Still trying to deal with Cox, as well as the TGM Prado apartment complex where I live. Other Cox Communications customers are having issues with their HBO services it seems. Albeit, it appears theirs was taken away, while, mine was never turned on, even after Cox supposedly certified from outside that all services were accounted for, then later by certified letter from Cox, rebutted by video proof that the service is still disabled and not functional possibly by design.
Sure it’s in Oklahoma, but still.
; ANSWER SECTION: 64.182.168.98.in-addr.arpa. 71009 IN PTR ip98-168-182-64.ok.ok.cox.net.
As a follow-up to my deleted Facebook profile.
Here’s what Appelbaum had to say:
How to use Facebook safely
Here’s the easy solution: don’t fucking surveil yourself! If you want to stay safe on Facebook, the answer is, you should not use it, and don’t tag people!…
What’s the greatest database of Jews on the planet? Facebook. What will happen when you want the biggest database of leftists on the planet? Or right wing people? That’s really, really scary, so one way to not be part of that dataset is to not put yourself in it voluntarily, and to chastise people who only hang out with you to tag you in facebook as a sort of conspicuous consumption of the 21st Century say: “Hey, if that’s all you get out of our friendship then go fuck yourself!”
…
It’s crazy to me that in the early 21st century there are places that have gigabit internet connections or 100mbit connections, and regular everyday people in developed countries end up with connections way slower than that. They need to buy a server in a data centre to use the internet effectively — but they don’t know how to do that. So the government can incentivise that with positive regulation. They already did it with roads for the car industry, why don’t they do it with the internet for everyday people, all the time?
There’s a great article on Forbes about the Internet and piracy as it is today.
…
The only other thing you could get the Internet to agree on was if they tried to institute a ban on cat pictures.
So, what to do? Go the other direction. Realize piracy is a service problem. Right now, from the browser window in which I’m writing this article, it is possible to download and start watching a movie for free in a few swift clicks.
(This is all purely theoretical of course)
- Move mouse to click on Pirate Bay bookmark
- Type in “The Hangover 2″ awful movie, but a new release for the sake of the example
- Click on result with highest seeds
- Click download torrent
- Auto open uTorrent
- Wait ten minutes to download
- Play movie, own it forever
…
Right now, the industry is still stuck in the past, and is crawling oh-so-slowly into the future. They still believe people are going to want to buy DVDs or Blu-rays in five years, and that a movie ticket is well worth $15. Netflix is the closest thing they have to an advocate, but the studios are trying to drive them out of business as they see them as a threat, not a solution. It’s mind boggling.
…
Treat your customers with respect , and they’ll do the same to you. And that is how you fight piracy.
via You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You – Forbes.
Some people just want the fake watch, which looks nice, and cost $20 from some fly by night website. The old saying, “If it is too good to be true, it must be.” really only applies to physical goods and items, which have an actual cost to create, not something which can be digitally duplicated instantly by millions of consumers, thereby creating supposed value out of thin air.
It’s really not a wonder that digital piracy will never go away. It will always be simpler and easier to find what you want, when you want it, in this day of connectivity, even as it is being held back by providers. Especially when Hollywood, and the media distribution, cable, satellite, companies such as Cox Communications, do not care that their products being sold are broken by design, overpriced, and solely developed through fancy sounding or exclusive business relationships, and monopolies held in place by the FCC, through the FCC’s own revolving lobbyist doors. Neither of the C’s in FCC are defined as consumer, or citizen. But a stark reality is not many people actually care about this saddening hypocrisy. So much for caring about people, or simply the customers which keep your lights on.
Update:
Let’s not forget about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling about corporations being “people.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlPQkd_AA6c