sigkill

Thank you, I think I needed to hear this. The person I'm talking to seems exactly like this. While I want to be working on important problems (hell if not important, atleast 'cool' ones), they just want a money making 'thing'.

I've been mulling for a while on how to go ahead with it, but this has made me more than certain our wavelengths do not match even though he's great at connections and selling hard.

Another way of looking at it is, when the cars came, the carriages were obsolete. Sure, the drivers may have reskilled to some other vocation but what about the horse? In this situation, we are the horses, and the AI is the car.

Lines are visible where the pieces are joined to each other, however instead of looking bad, it gives it a very deathstar/futuristic feel especially with the glossy black pieces.

Maybe I'm appealing to the wrong sentiment but most of these control softwares aren't available for Linux. Large CO2 generation plants, tissue plants, whatchamaycallit, it's just not available. So, the problem is with the vendors.

Another problem is that the people who decide to buy the software are completely clueless about what is secure or not. They may ask for 'advice' from their more tech savvy juniors but that is merely a formality to confirm their view point, as anything contrary to their already decided viewpoint is quickly discarded with the mental rationalization of 'He probably doesn't have my experience' or 'I know better because I'm senior and I've been around these longer than him.'

Coming to the technical aspects of the box, the product is fine in the sense that it does exactly what it says technically - routing your connection via Tor. Using verified credentials over Tor is a bad idea for that specific identity. If you're the kind of person who's going to buy this, I can take a guess that a large percent of the population wouldn't really know how it works and will think "I'm anonymous and private now, thanks to this little box" and use the Internet exactly as they were using it before - bad idea. The concept is flawed simply because a layman will use email and facebook over Tor and then bam! you can identify him instantly.

TL;DR - Operation successful, patient is dead.

One, on messaging, people would use text to contact me or each other if they notice that WhatsApp/Talk message hasn't reached for a couple of minutes. And a call is very helpful to transmit high density info in short time.

Two, I can still use my very nice phone with a large screen to watch videos, read ebooks on the go like if I'm in a bus or something. The difference here is that these things are not infinity-sinks in my experience - I can go 1 hour or so reading a book on a cellphone but then need to take a break which is when you look up and around. Also, subconsciously, the permanence of the book/video prioritizes real world interrupts (in an embedded programming context) rather than blocking them.

Then, you always have music that you can copy to the phone and listen to if you don't want to put your face to the screen. This enables you to move your head around everywhere and still not be all that bored because you still have that music going on.

If I absolutely want, which is almost never, I play games but I find that mobile games are not something that I like so it never comes up at all.

But a lot of time, I've just noticed myself looking around, just absorbing the world around me and being in my own thoughts rather than a forced stimulus and I find that relaxing unless I'm stuck in a very noisy environment in which case the earphone doubles up as a noise blocker.

And the general trend I've heard here is that you need to be on email. But work already has wifi and if you're at work your computer is right in front of you. Secondly, aren't you making a big mistake by configuring work email on your phone?

Maybe I'm the second coming of RMS but I do not install Facebook and Twitter apps on my phone for privacy reasons. Checking at most once everyday seems to be enough for me but I know that's not the case with everyone. It seems a lot of plans are made over fb for you guys, which is understandable - we use hangouts and whatsapp over here, but primarily whatsapp. But more importantly, for immediate plans we generally use SMS and phone calls which might be why we're not as reliant on facebook. FB is considered more of a public 'show-off' billboard than a private friend group.

So yeah, maybe this was worthy of its own blog-post but my gist here is that turning off the data does wonders. You still get to retain those handy unit converters, two factor authenticators, password wallets and other things that are yours without the Skinner box annoyances of the infinity-sinks.

Of course, before someone rants "You don't know how important it is to have internet on my phone", I'd say you're obviously right. However, maybe after reading my post, you realize that it isn't all that important then kudos to you. You should atleast try it once before knocking it right? A lot of times we think "It's impossible to get through without X" but humans are surprisingly adaptive and can cope without X just fine.

I'm just sharing my experience, hoping that it's useful to you.

The faster you move, the lesser "Time" needs to be in order to be equal to c.

Secondly, with such strongly hostile customer service representatives the more you speak that's more ammo you're giving them to argue without cancelling the contract. If you say, 'customer service is poor' there's a high chance that CSR going to pull up records saying that "You called us X times with Y and Z complaints and we have responded to them within 48 hours. That's well within our metrics" or some bs like that.

Talking to hostile CSRs is akin to talking to the cops - don't speak more than you have to.