I’ve been car shopping lately and have come across two instances where the car is advertised as a “Carfax 1-owner” vehicle, but the car has actually had two owners. Carfax.com does in fact report 1 owner, but when checking the vehicle with Experian AutoCheck, they report 2 owners. In one case I was actually able to determine Experian was the one that was correct, because the dealership had all of the sales records for the car in the glove box.
Don’t trust Carfax.
Coverage I’ve read of the story focuses on Comcast having an unfair advantage over other ISPs, or vertical integration gains they’ll make by joining forces with NBC. But there are two other things I wish were being discussed:
1) Net neutrality. Unfair advantage over other ISPs would be a non-issue if we had decent net neutrality laws in place. There would be no risk of Comcast abusing their power (by slowing down video feeds from other providers).
2) Broadband as a public utility. I strongly believe that broadband should be regulated as a public utility, just like power and water. The fact that Comcast has grown so large that they can drop $14B on another company is unbelievable. They have no competition on cable Internet like the DSL providers do, because cable Internet doesn’t use the phone lines–which are regulated as a public utility–so they’ve been able to overcharge subscribers. If this system were fixed the Comcast purchase of NBC would also be a non-issue.
The 72 hour “free phone service” experiment has failed. Only about 1 in 3 outgoing calls actually have worked. Call quality is terrible. Frequent drops. Sometimes the line will start doing a “fast busy” in the middle of the conversation. About 1 in 3 times I reboot my ATA it just flat-out can’t connect Gizmo.
But the most frustrating thing is Google Voice’s “Call” interface doesn’t tell you what’s going on. It just says “Now connecting…”, which would be fine if it actually connected. When there’s an error, or your phone never rings, you’re left there wondering what the hell happened.
New data released last week from the CDC:
Therefore:
Children only:
Therefore:
I wonder how they come up the 22M and 8M. I was sick with something bad last week. I thought, “no way it’s swine flu.” But I looked up the symptoms for swine flu, and I actually met the symptoms. (Which are basically, “it’s like the flu”). It wasn’t until seeing these numbers I thought, “well maybe I did have swine flu”. There are 304M people in the US, so 7% of the population has already gotten it.
If you go through the old CDC data it appears the flu typically peaks in February, so we might be a ways from hitting the peak of H1N1.
I stumbled across the video “The Case for a Creator”, which claims to be a scientific explanation of why “science” proves the existence of God and creationism. I found it very entertaining on a number of levels.
The video presents science from microbiology to astrobiology. At every step of the way, the science that is presented is used to dispute Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. It’s comical, laugh-out-loud funny; the leaps in logic are pretty astounding.
But something occurred to me while watching it that I hadn’t known how to articulate before: why can’t evolution and intelligent design be compatible? If you accept, as the video supposes, that an intelligent designer constructed bacteria that later (“suddenly”) turned into complex multi-celled organisms, presumably at the hands of this intelligent designer, why can’t you accept the intelligent designer designed evolution?
Simple rules, when combined and run over time with the right initial conditions, create complex and unexpected behaviors. Chaos Theory and Intelligent Design design combine to make Evolution? Any takers?
Just teach your kids God guided evolution and then we can all get along.
I stumbled across this blog entry on the IBM corporate mantra from years-gone-by: THINK. That’s it. Just “think”.
It got me “think”ing about my experience at Hewlett-Packard when I was in and just-out-of college. I really bought into The HP Way while I was there. I still think about it to this day.
Are these corporate mantras distilling the visions of their respective companies for their employees, or are they cleverly disguised brainwashing exercises designed to trick you into feeling good about your work? While I know people that would say they are the latter, I opt for the former. And I present as a reason for this the argument that they aren’t used anymore.
Nowadays, when a company tries to “invent” a new mantra for itself, it’s not taken seriously. (See what I just did there?) It might be naive to say that mantras have to come from the founder(s) of the company, but I’m not aware of any modern company that’s been able to create a new mantra for itself, one that inspires employees and invokes the greater good. It’s got to be built into the fabric of the company.
Will we have another HP or IBM in this country?
I’ve been calling around trying to get quotes on a specific vehicle I’m interested in (yes, I’m torn about the CARS program but when there’s a deal to be had I can’t help myself).
Car dealers say the darndest things:
“Oh you can’t that get anymore.”
“That car doesn’t exist.”
“We’re the only dealer that carries that car.”
“This crisis was created by an excess of debt… how should we fix it? MORE DEBT.”
On some level that makes sense, but this direct application–encouraging more consumer loans for car purchases–just seems idiotic on so many levels.
Not to mention the environmental impact. The lack of reuse. No recycling of working vehicles. The CARS bill mandates the vehicle be destroyed by the dealer.
When I first learned about this program I spent a great deal of time analyzing the different ways I could trade-in my 20 year-old vehicle to get a new car. I’d love to have a new car, but the more I thought about it, the worse I felt about it. My 1990 Pathfinder is a perfectly workable vehicle. It’s got low miles, runs well, and is a pretty comfortable ride. It just seems ludicrous to have the vehicle scrapped.
“But I can get a new car for $4500 off, ” I thought…
What if the humane society had a program where they paid you for your old dog, shot it dead, and then gave you a new puppy at a discount?
The cash for clunkers program sets my inner environmental pragmatist against my inner economist. I hate you lawmakers that signed this bill, I hate you. (shakes fist)
And why single-out the automobile industry? There are a lot of other ailing industries that could use their own cash for x program.
Cash for crappers, toilet upgrade program
Cash for consoles, video game upgrade program
Cash for kittens, cat upgrade program (wasn’t this an SNL sketch?)
You’re an inspiration to us all, and proof that we can do anything if we put our minds together. Thank you!
The iPhone dev team announced a few days ago that the jailbreak technique they discovered for the 2nd gen iPod touch will likely work on the new iPhone 3G S. At first I was excited to hear about this.. If they can jailbreak it then it’s only a matter of time until they publish an unlock and I can go back to T-Mobile prepaid. This would save me over $1000 over the next two years. As an iPhone user this is great news.
But as an iPhone developer, this is very sad news. If you can jailbreak your phone then you can run unsigned code on it, which means you’ll be able to pirate games on the 3G S.
Now I’m not someone to whine about piracy. That would make me a massive hypocrite. But growing up in an age when tty spoofing and blue boxes still worked has given me a bit of a nuanced view on piracy (and security systems in general). I don’t think it should be illegal for people hack systems in order to gain greater access to them, or to utilize the fruits of their work to break intellectual property laws (which need overhauling anyways). But I do think it should be the right of intellectual property holders and security system developers to do everything they can to prevent people from gaining access to their systems and utilizing their work in new and different ways than they intended.
So back when Apple first launched the App Store it was happy days for everyone. You could run homebrew code unsigned using a variety of pwn tools, but you could also pay for software through the App Store–and this paid software could only be ran on devices that it was digitally signed to run on. But then the hackers figured out a way to effectively unsign signed apps and then you could run a paid application on any phone. I’m not saying this is wrong. It’s just sad that Apple’s encryption was defeated.
I was hoping the 3G S would turn the tides back in the IP holder’s favor, making it impossible–at least for a short time–to run apps that weren’t signed specifically for you on your phone. I mean, eventually it needs to happen (duh!) but I was hoping it would be another year, or at least another 6-9 months.
So I have mixed feelings. I wish they would release a baseband exploit that frees us from the tyranny of AT&T and not a jailbreak that allows people to pirate my one dollar game. But I seriously doubt the holders of these exploits will be that generous. 🙂
Update: Shoutout to the guys on the iPhone Games Network who discussed this post on a recent podcast. I wouldn’t quite say I’m “pleading” with the hacker community to not release a jailbreak (afaik you need the jailbreak in order to apply the baseband exploit anyways), I’m just saying it would be incredibly awesome of them to release a baseband crack that doesn’t jailbreak your phone. 🙂 And quite honestly, I think Apple would feel the same way. They probably hate AT&T more than the rest of us combined–it was pretty obvious in their WWDC talks there was some friction there.