So sick of the over-use of “slam”. Where it does work? “Car door slams finger.” Elsewhere? No. Never.

Him, the evening before: “Oh yes, you’re a bigly big mac aren’t you, let’s just curl up on the couch and watch my stories…”

Seen it on the east coast, Intermountain west, and midwest. People are dumb these days. They think Siri takes the wheel.

Ha!

California seems to more and more do categorically weird things. Newsom especially.

Hah, my curse is calls always finding weird ways to drop. Then I moved to a place with no cell service, because I’m apparently a wireless masochist?

Perhaps he was secretly rich, and thusly his esoteric definition was actually an eccentricity.

There’s some slight technical reason for it, but I think they swung a bit too far in the asshole direction with blocking too many.

The LTE rollout was completely botched from the start. LTE voice is technically supported on all LTE chipsets, but early on the voice spec changed. Early phones used LTE for data and 2G or 3G for voice.

Complicating matters further, AT&T and Verizon both have separate and slightly tweaked versions of the spec, as they didn’t want to wait for it to be finalized, and of course they’re both different in different ways. It’s also why T-Mobile allows so many devices. They just rode their very fast for the time HSPA+ network until LTE was finalized, got generic hardware on the network, and flipped the power switch.

To top it off, AT&T was sued at one point for 911 not working due to a handset bug and they got very controlling at that point to avoid future lawsuits.

VoLTE is ostensibly VoIP over cellular data at its core. All phones have to talk with the correct SIP signaling on VoLTE for voice calls to work. With 2G and 3G, the circuit-switched method of signaling was much more standardized (although not necessarily simpler, WCDMA at its end spanned literal volumes of books.) This made it so phones and networks were more easily compatible for basic things like voice, 911, etc.

Now, on top of Verizon and AT&T thinking that rolling their own flavors of LTE was a good idea, every phone maker also had their own idea about how the VoLTE SIP signaling was supposed to work. Due to flaws in the LTE spec, carriers going rogue, and companies interpreting things wrong, it has turned quite literally into a clusterfuck.

TL;DR: It took a long time for LTE to standardize enough across product lines, and there are a whole bunch of phone models that don’t talk the language quite right. So carriers chose to ban rather than make workarounds or work with the vendor to roll a software fix to the phone.

Baloo does own a cargo plane.

And government agencies. They circumvent laws about citizen data privacy and situations where they would otherwise be required to have warrants by leveraging these third-party data brokers.

I found out on one bank site that if you filled up all the phone number slots with bogus phone numbers, Zelle couldn’t be activated. Basically try to logjam your bank so Zelle can’t be enabled, so that way it’s more difficult for haxx0rs to do it.

Stupid. Wish it could be 100% blocked on bank accounts if you don’t want to use it as it is a huge security hole.

Nah, more of a challenge. California normally leads the way with things that are good. Competition towards good things is good.

Up to $210 if uninsured.

Nice to see California catching up to Colorado.

I’m not pro-China, but will probably sound that way here. We are all nation-states composed of arbitrary rules. We all think we are the best. We all think the others are less. We all do shitty things to our people. We also need each other to survive. It’s a clusterfuck that needs a fix. Xenophobia is never the answer.

One cannot really use a universal fact shared between the two nations as a plot point.

Oh, yeah, the US Federal Government would neeevvverrr put backdoors into things. Not ever. Not BlackBerry, or iPhone, or messaging apps, or anything…

…oh, wait.

Duh, it’s so simple. The lab released infected animals to the wet market. All bases covered.

I’ll take my research grant now.

(This is all said non-serious to be clear.)

Is that the latest bear name Russia is using? They’re not very clever in their naming of their shit orgs and furry obsessed with bears.

I asked ChatGPT if it knew of that, and even with it’s heavy microsoft influence it was confused.