For most of a century, AT&T ripped off its customers by requiring
them to rent their phones, meaning that over the life of your phone
subscription, you would buy your phone thousands of times over.
Comcast (and its cable industry co-monopolists) is so much better at this than AT&T ever was.
Not only do they extract $200/year
from every subscriber to rent a shitty, insecure, power-inefficient
set-top box: they also trick you into renting a modem for your cable
internet – a device they pay an estimated $40 for, and then net
$275m-$300m every quarter by renting out to you.
As if that wasn’t bad enough: Comcast’s cable-modems are horribly
insecure. This week, we learned that a bug in the company’s website
allowed anyone in the world to look up the passwords for any Comcast
modem along with the home addresses of Comcast subscribers where the
modem could be found.
Comcast has to let you bring your own modem, and if you do, they are
supposed to stop charging you the rental fee (you might have to chase
them for months or years to get them to stop billing you for this of
course, and the company might charge you $90 in “installation fees” even
if the “installation” is you plugging in your own modem).
You should do this. I’m embarrassed to admit that even though I don’t
use the modem Charter supplied with our home internet, I haven’t
returned it. I’m in Phoenix for Comics Fest
this week, but I’ve made a note to drive over to Charter and give them
back their insecure, overpriced piece of shit modem when I get home.
M42: The Great Orion Nebula : Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula’s glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud. Many of the filamentary structures visible in the featured image are actually shock waves – fronts where fast moving material encounters slow moving gas. The Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located about 1500 light years away in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye just below and to the left of the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. The featured image, taken last month, shows a two-hour exposure of the nebula in three colors. The whole Orion Nebula cloud complex, which includes the Horsehead Nebula, will slowly disperse over the next 100,000 years. via NASA
@intersexmycroft: “the flashcards in your calligraphy blog is how i imagine mycroft leaves notes”; “stuck on the fridge, eloquently calligraphied: ‘if you eat my ice cream i will kill u’”
So, I looked in the comments, expecting to see discourse or historical background etc, but I found none. Therefore, I decided to learn more and add background. Apparently this machine was used because of polio because polio paralyzes your lungs. According to the wiki article on this bad boy, patients would spend two weeks in there sometimes. They still have these machines, though much, much more modern but they’re barely used at all anymore: “In 1959, there were 1,200 people using tank respirators in the United States, but by 2004 there were only 39. By 2014, there were only 10 people left with an iron lung.” (x)
I’ve read about one man who still lives in an iron lung. He taught himself how to breathe again by gulping down air, but it’s quite laborious because of the paralysis. His name is Paul Alexander, and he’s a lawyer. He’s 71 years old and has spent 65 years in an iron lung. Wild, right? He’s been working on a memoir that he was inspired to write by the recent resurgence of cases of polio caused by anti-vaccers.
It’s amazing to me to recognize that we only defeated polio in this past century – that my mother’s father had it (he got lucky, it only deformed his feet and thereby kept him out of a couple wars); my mother got the big vaccination that left her upper arm scarred; and by the time I was vaccinated, polio basically didn’t exist. My grandfather must have been born like around 1900, so – in the space of less than 75 years, this was no longer something that parents dreaded the possibility of every summer.
Polio still thrives in a lot of countries, including India. I watched a documentary about it Netflix. The disease runs rampant in well-developed countries, and with more people traveling around the world there is more exposure to this and many other diseases. When polio survivors in India were interviewed and asked about the anti-vaccination movement in the USA they had this look of total disgust and shock. Idiot anti-vaxxers are placing a death sentence on their children, would rather they die or have permanent scars and disabilities, would rather listen to lies about vaccinations causing autism.
We had a big round of whooping cough tear through this tiny town I live in. Children DIED because they were too young for the vaccination. The people who caused this, the carriers, are anti-vaxxers. No idea what happened to them. One child died because the coughing broke a rib and damaged their lungs.
Some polio survivors have had to live in an iron lung their entire lives because the vaccination wasn’t readily available. Now the vaccine is and it’s fools and idiots sentencing the most vulnerable to a painful death because of ignorance.
I worked with toddlers and pre schoolers for three years. Sometimes I accidentally slip and tell a friend to say bye to an inanimate object (“say bye bus!”) & occasionally they unthinkingly just do it.
I’m glad there’s a teacher version of “accidentally called teacher ‘mom’”
when I worked at Medieval Times occasionally I would slip in real life and call people “my lord”
One time during family prayer, dad began: “our father who art in heaven, American Airlines, how can I help you?”
One time my dad went to the White Castle drive-thru and the lady (who was supposed to say ‘Welcome to White Castle, what’s your crave?’) asked, “Welcome to White Castle, what’s your problem?”
She apologized profusely while my dad proceeded to lose his shit laughing.
Yesterday I went to Wendy’s and the girl said “Welcome to McDonalds” and then just sighed
Somebody in the elevator asked me what floor I lived on, and I answered “please open your books to page eight”, and we just kind of stared at each other, blinking.
i work retail full time and my script gets frequently messy – ill ask the same question twice, or say “$2.60 is your total” while handing back their change, or say “how are you doing today?” instead of “have a good day!” like name it ive bungled it
but anyway, this lady came thru my line buying a book and the review on the front said: “few books are well written, fewer still are important, and this book manages to be both”
as i handed her the bag i was trying to say “thanks, youre all set” and instead my brain mashed up the review and i said “thanks, youre important”
there was this short pause in which i tried to figure out what the fuck id just said. she blinked and then said “oh thank you! youre important too!”
the real kicker was one of my coworkers. when i was relating this story later his response was “at least you said something NICE. last week i accidentally combined ‘youre welcome’ and ‘no problem’ into ‘youre a problem’”
one time, since I used to work as a daycare teacher with preschoolers, i was on my college campus in my gym, and someone was running in the weight room and tripped over a machine and fell, and instead of offering to help, I just stared and said, “This is why we use our walking feet.”
we both sat there for a while until the guy nodded and said, “yeah, okay, i should’ve done that.”
I once asked my mom if she would like to take a customer service survey at the end of a phone call.
An afternoon last week I bought a pair of boots and as I left I said “night night” to the salesperson. My wife was next to me and just lost it. (I still wonder if the salesperson slept well that night. Hope so.)
We had a bell that the cashiers would ring when we got a tip. When the bell rang, the entire kitchen woohood, hollered, yipped, etc. When I was at another restaurant with my family, there was a bell customers could ring if they enjoyed their meal. I accidentally yelled loudly three times during one meal with my family because customers rang that bell…
VPNFilter is a sophisticated, multi-stage malware package, part of the new breed of boot-persistent malware
(software that can survive a reboot); it targets home routers and
network-attached storage devices, then steals passwords and logins that
traverse the network and exfiltrates it to the creators’ servers.
The malware is capable of bricking the devices it infects, possibly to
prevent forensic analysis, or to simply cut off internet access for
entire regions by bricking every router in a city, state or country.
VPNFilter is thought to be the work of a state actor, and is believed to have infected 500,000 devices so far.
Antivirus provider Symantec issued its own advisory Wednesday that identified the targeted devices as:
Linksys E1200
Linksys E2500
Linksys WRVS4400N
Mikrotik RouterOS for Cloud Core Routers: Versions 1016, 1036, and 1072
Netgear DGN2200
Netgear R6400
Netgear R7000
Netgear R8000
Netgear WNR1000
Netgear WNR2000
QNAP TS251
QNAP TS439 Pro
Other QNAP NAS devices running QTS software
TP-Link R600VPN
Both Cisco and Symantec are advising users of any of these devices to do a factory reset, a process that typically involves holding down a button in the back for five to 10 seconds. Unfortunately, these resets wipe all configuration settings stored in the device, so users will have to reenter the settings once the device restarts. At a minimum, Symantec said, users of these devices should reboot their devices. That will stop stages 2 and 3 from running, at least until stage 1 manages to reinstall them.
Users should also change all default passwords, be sure their devices are running the latest firmware, and, whenever possible, disable remote administration. (Netgear officials in the past few hours started advising users of “some” router models to turn off remote management. TP-Link officials, meanwhile, said they are investigating the Cisco findings.
There’s no easy way to determine if a router has been infected.
Uranium glass has actually been around for a very long time. It dates as far back as 79 AD. A mosaic from this time period which contained uranium oxide was discovered in a location close to Naples Italy. Later the discoverer of uranium as a chemical element Martin Klaproth born in the 16th century would experiment with the element in the coloration of glass. However, it was not for another 50 years before glass manufacturers started adding uranium on a regular basis to bring more colorful products to the marketplace to match demand.
Fast forward to the early 20th-century to find uranium glass being produced in large quantities in all shapes and forms including household objects such as ornamental and decorative pieces, tableware, jewelry, and sculptures. Unfortunately, the production of uranium glass declined sharply during the cold war during which time the availability of uranium decreased considerably. Because of this many examples of uranium glass from to this period are very desirable and highly collectible. Modern-day production of traditional opaic uranium glass is primarily limited to smaller trinket like pieces. However, there is a greater production of Vaseline glass.
The term Vaseline glass refers to uranium glassware which is transparent, however, the term vaseline glass is often used as a synonym to describe all uranium glass. To add to the confusion the opposite can also be true as many people use the term uranium glass in a generic way which includes the transparent vaseline glass. The name vaseline glass originated in the 1920’s as a nickname due to a perception that the transparent glass had a resemblance to petroleum jelly. Just like all uranium glass, the use of an ultraviolet blacklight in the dark will cause it to fluoresce and glow which is the appealing feature and hallmark of all uranium glass.
