Notices by Woozle Hypertwin (woozle@toot.cat), page 3

@dredmorbius That would presumably require several hours of time, with unknown probability of victory?

Could I possibly claim for the time invested, at my usual rate of $60/hour?

So, Frontier is claiming I owe them $74.98, months after I cancelled the account.

I sent them a letter asking for an accounting of the amounts which lead to this total, with date for each, so I could verify that I actually owed it -- and their response has been to send it to a collection agency, CCS, who is (of course) reiterating the demand without providing any new information.

Does anyone know how to say "fsck off, I don't owe this" in legalese?

@Angle @ghost_bird

The problem is that most monopolists *don't* invest in R&D (or anything else socially useful).

If there were some kind of regulation to promote this -- e.g. requiring all companies with more than 33% market share to be cooperatives -- then perhaps it would happen often enough to justify allowing monopolies.

As long as the excess profit goes to private shareholders, though... just no. >.<

@HYPERLINK Advertising is pretty much the ultimate waste of resources.

It accomplishes nothing but to convince you to choose one brand over another, or to buy something you wouldn't otherwise have bought.

(Occasionally it performs the service of informing you of the existence of something useful you didn't previously know existed, but there are better ways of doing that.)

@sydneyfalk Now in R&D: toilet-handle-based battery tech

@sydneyfalk

Other MPAO publicity campaigns include:

If you don't talk to your kids about orbital strikes, who will?
It's 8:00 -- do you know where your orbital strike is?
Never initiate an orbital strike while driving.
Remember -- only *you* can stop orbital strikes!

@GreenandBlack @Wewereseeds
cc: @eryn

More people need to be aware that it's a fallacy: https://issuepedia.org/Appeal_to_nature

(apologies for bits of Issuepedia being borken at the moment)

@sydneyfalk Memento 2: The Wrath of cron

@ThorstenAnzomi Yeah, that would work as an optimization.

I think right now I want to make the UI more intelligible, but that could be the next thing. ...also some way to keep track of current progress in comparisons, so I can resume an interrupted session without having to redo the comparisons.

@ThorstenAnzomi Belated thought: if sftp had an API function for returning a hash of a file, that would *definitely* make it faster to compare hashes than block-by-block.

Failing that... I suppose it would be easy enough to just write a utility to calculate a hash for a local file, and then have the remote request that... or does such a thing exist already, perhaps? But this would still require executing remote code...

@pzmyers Someone on Twitter via Diaspora made another observation about this:

"Bill McGlashan epitomizes the modern fantasy that the rich people who rigged the modern world, who monopolized the American dream for themselves, are the solution to redressing our injustices. [...] and now [McGlashan] has been indicted for rigging the opportunity structure against the disadvantaged."

https://pluspora.com/posts/4c84fcf0281f0137cfc5005056264835

@bstacey ...I don't suppose you're still in touch with him and he still has it...?

@ThorstenAnzomi Any favorites?

@ThorstenAnzomi I did FORTRAN IV (and then 77), then Pascal, then C++, then VB6, then a bit of Perl and finally PHP.

@ThorstenAnzomi Been there -- I ended up translating backprop neural network code from Pascal to ASM86 just to get a few percentage points of improvement in speed.

(Geez, isn't there anything faster than a 486DX-25?? :D)