Sleeep

Wow!! Screw trains, as a Hudson Valley native, Hudson valley is not Westchester.

I hope the trains pass you by. We don't want you.

Yeah, I suspected. Counterfeiter seem to really cheap out on the label a lot.

I should have added a caveat, I actually agree with you and I, too, was skeptical of the fact this has been happening. However, since the FCC released an official document about it I figured it was worth mentioning as a theoretical possibility. I am unaware of many cases where the FCC spread urban legends without getting actual complaints, so people presumably have actually been complaining about this happening to them to the FCC, or at least them believing it's happened to them.

The "can you hear me" call would have to take place AFTER a scammer had already charged your card for a dubious service. They would (probably?) have to have a merchant account with a payment processor for that.

IDK, I would not, personally, consider my town in any way suburban. It's European "founding" predates the American revolution and the vast majority of the construction in the town center is pre war and it's nowhere near any major or even minor urban area.

My opinion on suburbia that I stated was based on what would be "suburban town" moreso than a "suburban bedroom community." I've never lived in the latter.

I know it's just my opinion though, I know some people like suburbia but smallish towns like mine are better at providing greenery, nature, and a low cost of living plus a pleasant environment. To me suburbs are the opposite of that. (Getting to the airport is a giant pain in the ass though...)

Pretty much the first thing I did when I moved here was take a walk!

I'm not familiar with Westchester specifically but, to me, suburbia isn't good for any of those things you mentioned. To me suburbia feels like a giant mass produced parking lot and is an incredibly depressing display of concrete! Nature is nowhere to be found in the suburbs. The real estate is very expensive in desirable suburbs and traffic is still bad in the suburbs, just bad in a different way than in a bigger city.

Right now I live in what I guess would be described as a town. Its ~100 miles from any major urban area and it's much more effective at providing the majority of the things you mentioned plus amazingly short commute times! It also has some sorts of benefits you would associate with the city as well - for example, I can walk to at least 10 establishments as well as 2 parks whereas when I lived in a suburb the street I lived off of was 4 lanes 45 MPH and didn't even have a sidewalk. Even if it did have a sidewalk the noise of a mass of neverending SUVs buzzing past is unpleasant.

You would also have no problem driving almost everywhere in a smaller city.

What was the outcome? Did you require stitches or lose the thumb? Do you have lasting nerve damage or similar?

Uh! I was once referred by a real MD to a real (licensed) physical therapist who worked in a real physical therapy office who performed a purely quack "procedure" (craniosacral therapy) on me and they billed my insurance for "physical manipulation" which they paid. My insurance specifically excludes craniosacral therapy as a covered expense.

Uh,I felt terrible about the whole thing, it seems like a cut and dried case of insurance fraud to me. My MD said she was sending me to physical therapy so I thought I'd be getting real treatment and didn't think about it further. I never heard of craniosacral therapy before that but it was clear that the physical therapist was practicing woo once I was actually there.

The worst thing is, since craniosacral therapy claims to treat almost every symptom and every disease she may refer 90% of her patients. :(

https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-warns-can-you-hear-me-phone...

The scam begins when a consumer answers a call and the person at the end of the line asks, “Can you hear me?” The caller then records the consumer's "Yes" response and thus obtains a voice signature. This signature can later be used by the scammers to pretend to be the consumer and authorize fraudulent charges via telephone.

In other words they splice together "do you want to authorize these charges?" And your "Yes" and present this as "proof" to the credit card company you authorized the charges you are disputing.

That says nothing about phone numbers, just addresses.

Selling an address updating service to parties that already have your address is not the same as "straight up sell[ing] your phone number when you move."

From the horses mouth:

"The information you supply will be used to provide you with the requested mail forwarding and related services. Please be aware that this service is voluntary, and that requested information is required to provide the service. Collection of information for this service is authorized by 39 U.S.C. §403 and 404. We do not disclose your personal information to anyone, except in accordance with the Privacy Act. Authorized disclosures include limited circumstances such as the following ... to mailers, if already in possession of your name and old mailing address, as an address correction service. Information will also be provided to licensed service providers of the USPS to perform mailing list correction service of lists containing your name and old address. A list of these licensed service providers can be obtained at the following URL: http://ribbs.usps.gov/ncoalink /documents/tech_guides/CERTIFIED_LICENSEES"

They imply they only provide the new address but saying "the information you supply" leaves it open to for them to provide your phone number along with your new address.

That's easy for you to say.

Back when I didn't have any money my phone budget was $8 a month. Minutes 10 cents a piece, IIRC. People didn't really text very much back then but those were 10 cents a piece as well. Each dime mattered to me very much.

There's also people with plans that only allow X minutes a month.

People on prepaid or pay as you go plans don't get unlimited minutes. You can't really just dismiss this segment of the population. It's a bit like saying "coffee is a free beverage for everyone because most offices provide coffee for employees."

Frames have been improved into iframe and then deprecated in HTML 5.

Frames were a nightmare. You can't link to a page in frames, you can't bookmark it either. Frames break the back button. Come in via search engine? You're only in the main frame, your navigation frame is missing. Want to print? Lol, good luck with that. You always ended up (either intentionally or unintentionally) with a browsing session within someone else's unrelated frameset.

I also heard they were bad for screen readers.

They were entered into evidence for a court case. Court documents are generally public record. That's how these messages went from private to public.

I wouldn't even think about bringing up natural selection to my young Earth creationist coworkers. Not touching that with a 10 foot pole, it would only end badly. There's a reason they say don't talk about politics or religion with your coworkers. Harmony is good for getting work done and I go to work to work.

I'm saying that as some who has actually worked with young Earth creationists before.

Thanks for the link! It looks like reocities didn't pick it up. (I downloaded all 250 links and grepped myself)

I apologize in advance as there's no non-morbid way to ask this but... what happens to the images on your server if you die tomorrow? It would be exactly the same situation, right? They would exist until your bill is due in a couple years then your account will be deactivated and your images will linkrot.

I was in geocities/South Beach/lounge but I can't remember the number and it annoys me. I know for a fact archive.org indexed it but they didn't at all after geocities moved to ~ urls. (That was after the Yahoo buyout IIRC)

I don't miss flash intos though. Or frames.

Good thing they were usually optional.

http://youvegotmail.warnerbros.com

Some good screenshots here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/how-25-popular-websi...

CNN's original online coverage of the OJ Simpson murder trial (1995) is still online and mostly intact - http://www.cnn.com/US/OJ/

Welcome to Netscape (94) - http://home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html

It's later than 96 but I don't know who is still paying for hosting for a stadium that was demolished over 16 years ago http://www.3riversstadium.com/index2.html

I remember Geocities pages would always be trying to read from my floppy drive. People would not realize you had to upload your pictures before other people could see them and just would put D:\pictures\goatse.jpg as the src of the img tag because they didn't really understand the web (not that I blame them.) Of course, the browser had no problem trying to load local images from untrusted code on a remote host, security policies were, uh, extremely permissive at the time.

(Of course, there would be plenty of attempting to read from the C:\ drive too, but that didn't make a loud, unexpected sound like reading from the floppy drive did)

Simple times.

The phone numbers accompanying the phat 90s slang scrawled across my 1996 yearbook no longer are a way of contacting my old classmates.

So, in my experience (FWIW) every Amazon customer service rep I've ever dealt with has extremely poor grasp of the English language and don't know how to veer off script (so to speak). If you say "the shipping weight does not make sense," they ignore that because their script/training only says "check the tracking number." It's like talking to a poorly programmed bot.

Counterfeit body wash, I haven't heard of that one before. How did you know it was counterfeit? The body wash or the packaging?

I won an eBay dispute as a seller and it was very easy. Buyer didn't scam me though, his account was hijacked. I believe him because when I looked at the shipping address more closely it was a mail forwarding service.

That reminds me, back during the Tamagotchi craze (which coincided with the Pokemon craze) there was a virtual pet Pikachu that rewarded you for walking (it was a pedometer) and the screen would show Pikachu walking while you were. It was pretty cute. Well, it wasn't long before my little brother figured out how to "cheat" He put it on the washer. (I think dryer worked as well)

I imagine someone working out with like 6 fitness trackers attached to them.

This is incredibly specific to an individual, so specific that the math would have to involve an algorithm with probably 15+ inputs.

Consumer Reports and the like have calculated "true cost of ownership" for different model cars you can use as a rough guideline. They estimate depreciation, taxes, financing, gas, maintenance, and insurance over 5 years. However, that's just a rough estimate and only a first step, it doesn't take into consideration individual variables. If you are a young male, have to drive in stop-and-go traffic every day, and pay to park everywhere your cost of ownership will probably be close to double.

Auto insurance alone is probably close to $100 a month for the average American - depending on your car, location, and driving record, of course, I'm just making an educated guess. IIRC, last I ran the numbers with my car (average budget model) cost of ownership was around ~$20,000 over 5 years. That's amortized to $333 a month.

Not quite, it depends how often you need to travel long distances and what the other options are for that travel. If you only need to drive 100 miles four times a year and otherwise have zero everyday commute costs because you ride a bicycle to work then renting a car four times a year is almost certainly a better option than buying a car just for those trips.

Additionally, if there is frequent and reliable train or bus service to your destination that may be a better option than driving. I know several people who don't own cars but travel 100+ miles via bus on a regular basis. On the other hand, I travel 100+ miles regularly but buses and trains don't go to where I am going.

(There's people who justify buying a truck because they need to haul stuff twice a year at the most. Renting a truck twice a year is almost guaranteed to be a better option financially. That being said, if you want a truck because you like trucks, that's also a perfectly valid reason to buy one.)

appropriately formatted

If the server is expecting data that it doesn't receive (because the form field was left blank) then can you really consider the request "appropriately formatted"? Is it in any way meaningfully different from the case where the server receives a request on /api/invalid-url/ and doesn't have a corresponding resource on its end?