Do not put up with sites that disrespect you with NOISE-MAKING, AUTO-PLAYING SHIT.

Nobody should give sites a free pass when they blast you with noise upon arrival. How spineless do you have to be to argue that it's OK for some assholes to wake your companion, disturb your coworkers, or otherwise disrupt your space with unauthorized noise?

And yet that's what sniveling apologists do in forum after forum.  But let's start with the perpetrators.

Like ABC News.  These jagoffs continue to blast readers with auto-playing shit, despite being told over and over not to do so.  What do these infants do after they're reprimanded for their bad behavior?  BAN the people who have the gall to stand up for themselves:

Fortune magazine is another prime offender.  They're such spineless twats that they've gotten rid of their comment sections altogether.  Complain directly to their staff, and they don't have the guts to respond.  Ever.  Tell them off here.

Here's a list of offensive Web sites that call you stupid to your face while bombarding you and everyone around you with their unauthorized shit:

HuffingtonPost.com

TheHill.com

ABCNews.com

CBSNews.com
CNet.com

I don't have time to catalog all of these assholes right now, so please submit any that you find, in the comments.

Google also deserves blame.  These hypocrites threatened a couple of years ago to "punish" sites that aren't "mobile-friendly;" and yet Google discriminates against mobile users by disabling zooming on the mobile versions of its own pages.

So why doesn't Google punish sites that abuse readers by blasting them with noise?  Google is supposedly taking the step of disabling this crap in Chrome, but why mask the behavior instead of addressing it directly?  Abusing your readers should cost you dearly, and yet Google shows its cowardice by failing to to take a stand against this abuse.

E-mail addresses as user IDs: stupid policy

Once again, Apple is facing a "hacking" fiasco that may have resulted from its own amateurish user-ID policy.

It's not that Apple was hacked; the problem is that millions of E-mail-address/password combinations have fallen into the hands of hackers. And those combinations are what Apple now forces you to use as your Apple ID, instead of letting you create a proper user ID. That is an ignorant policy.

Your E-mail address is on spammers' lists.  When you cross-reference these lists with lists of common passwords, you get a boatload of cracked accounts. And when forced to set up a log-in ID that is an E-mail address, what percentage of the public thinks they have to use (or simply decide to use) the same password that they use for their E-mail account?  I'm guessing at least a quarter.  So now these sites put every user's personal E-mail account at risk, regardless of where it is.   That's why this policy is a monumental security blunder.

If ANY service you use suffers a hack or information theft that includes your E-mail address and password, that combination can be used to access other services (like Apple's) that insist on this ignorant user-ID policy. And indeed, Apple confirmed that this is exactly what happened: "The alleged list of email addresses and passwords appears to have been obtained from previously compromised third-party services."

Here's another example of how this policy sets Apple and its customers up for security breaches and stolen data: http://www.zdnet.com/article/severe-ios-bug-allows-icloud-password-theft

While in this case there's a software defect involved, it still demonstrates how a spammer (who of course already knows your E-mail address) only needs to acquire your password; he can auto-populate the "user ID" field with your E-mail address, making it look legit.

You don't see banks forcing you to use an E-mail address.  Nor brokerages.  Nor credit-card companies.  Hell, even the most obscure comment forums let you set up a legitimate user ID.  But not Apple.

Aside from the glaring security problem, there's common sense.  We all have numerous E-mail addresses by now, and many people's addresses change over time. Which one did I use to sign up for this or that Web site months or years ago?  And when an address goes defunct, people think they need to set up a new ID.  Apple tells users that their Apple ID must be a functioning E-mail address; now they have a boatload of customers with multiple Apple IDs each, preventing them from managing their iTunes/App Store purchases or downloading updates because Apple refuses to consolidate the accounts that its own ignorant policy created.

Of course, Apple's not the only tech company making itself look like amateur hour online.  Amazon has also "taken steps" in response to this attack, but has failed to fix the glaring user-ID problem.  A while back, LinkedIn was caught uploading people's calendar appointments from their mobile devices, and compromising millions of users' passwords.  The first of these was an unauthorized transmission of users' data (in clear text, no less), an offense against users (not to mention Apple's clearly stated policies).  The second was just a failure.

But consider the source: LinkedIn joins Facebook, PayPal, and Apple in their requirement that your user ID be an E-mail address.  The sheer ignorance of this policy undermines any security-related credibility its source might have.

Users shouldn't sit back and shrug this off.  You don't need to roll over for businesses that steal your time and allow others to steal your identity or data.  Use this form to tell Apple that this policy is unacceptable.  Point them to this post or paraphrase it; we need to stop this ignorance.

You can read more about this debacle at The Next Web.  And here's another massive data breach that's going to be much worse because of this asinine policy.

User IDs aren't the only playground for incompetence.  Here comes United Healthcare, screwing up the password field with another offensive policy.

The Chicago Tribune censors anti-Rahm comments.

This is pretty pathetic. The Chicago Tribune will delete comments that criticize Chicago's highly disappointing mayor, Rahm Emanuel.

Take a look at this offense against the 1st amendment:

Yep. Is this Chicago, or China?

The Tribune is supposed to be the paper of the informed populace. But here it proves that it is a tool of corrupt interests.

Apple's war on usefulness and its own customers

After wading into the incompetent mess that was the cell-phone market before the iPhone and improving it, Apple has done a 180 and is now driving it backward.

Apple continually degrades its products, waging a war on usefulness and its own customers. The removal of the headphone jack is the latest and most offensive insult to customers and consumers in general. Apple and Jony Ive continue to call the public stupid, by releasing ever-more-crippled and anti-customer designs. And their only excuse is the long-tired and unasked-for marketing gimmick, "thinner."

The majority of customers have declared that Apple's iPhone design is a failure. How do we know this? They bury the "thin, elegant" iPhone in a tacky, bulky case. And with Jony Ive's insistence that you don't need a battery in your phone, those cases are even bulkier and tackier because they must also serve as the battery. Even Apple was compelled to release an embarrassing humpbacked condom for its flagship product.

Another testament to Apple's design failure is the legions of people carrying a power brick and wad of wire around with their "thin, elegant" iPhone, begging bartenders to plug them in or crawling under tables at restaurants to do so themselves. Ask anyone in the industry: Service establishments are having to lay down employee rules and policies about this behavior, a behavior that could easily be made nonexistent by simply putting a proper battery in the phone.

And then there are the functional and UI defects. The most embarrassing of which has existed since day one of the first iPhone, and has inexplicably not been fixed (an extremely simple fix at that): no audible notifications of missed calls. Seriously, on A PHONE. There's simply no excuse for this.

How about another software blunder, which causes people to miss flights and appointments and who knows what else? Yes, it's Apple's ridiculously incompetent calendar, which (without your permission) changes the times of appointments when you travel. And there's no way to prevent this behavior.

Then there's the UI, which is increasingly based on Easter eggs and secret "gestures." This is lazy, incompetent design. After setting the standard for phone UI and just nailing it with the best mobile browser right out of the gate, Apple is going backward fast. Now we have controls disguised as plain text. We have a music player where most of the toolbar controls are useless junk, and selecting a song doesn't bring up its album art and metadata anymore. We have an address book that once let you select a group (say, "Doctors") and go into it with one tap, but now inexplicably makes you go to the groups list, find and deselect the group you were showing, then find and select the one you want to see, and then dismiss the list. WTF? Who works like that?

The sad part is that Apple hasn't reached the bottom. They continue to call you stupid more aggressively and in more ways, making your investment in the Apple ecosystem less and less useful... and yet people still serve as tools and apologists for this behavior.

Why consumers and shareholders should punish Apple for removing the headphone jack.

Apple is waging a war against usefulness. Under design chief Jony Ive's regime, Apple's hardware has suffered continual regression that makes it less useful with every iteration.

I'm not talking about power users, either; I'm talking about the general public. And right now I'm talking about the iPhone.

You see it every day: People squatting in the corner of a coffee shop with their iPhone plugged into an outlet... and that's before lunch, when no battery should be dead. People carrying power bricks and wads of wire around, begging the bartender to plug their iPhones in. Or crawling under tables to do so themselves. This is what Jony Ive says you want. And it's pathetic.

Apple's excuse is its continued, baffling, and unasked-for mania to make things "thinner." As internal components shrink, Apple doesn't use the space for battery. It just makes the phone "thinner" (but not really, because the camera lens sticks out). Yet Apple wants us to use MORE battery power; for Bluetooth to communicate with the Watch, or stream music over the cellular radio, or use GPS-based apps and games. And the thinner phone is less ergonomic and more prone to being dropped and broken.

But we already knew that the majority Apple's customers have condemned the iPhone's design as a failure. How do we know? By simply observing that the vast majority of them have buried the "thin, elegant" iPhone in a bulky, tacky case. Because they believe it can't withstand being used for its primary purpose, and they simply can't reliably grasp it. And a growing number of those cases are even bulkier and tackier, because they must also serve as the phone's battery.

Even Apple felt compelled to introduce an embarrassing battery case for its so-called mobile phone.

But that's not the worse aspect of all of this. Now Apple has removed the audio output from its primary music players. Let's consider the stupidity of this move, which should anger every user and shareholder. Starting with a quote from MarketWatch (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/frank-ocean-cranks-up-the-apple-vs-spotify-beef-2016-08-26):

"With sales of iPhones stagnating, Chief Executive Tim Cook has focused on software and services as a growth engine for the world’s most valuable company"

Apple's aggressive promotion and spending on Apple Music prove that it considers music to be a major part of that "growth engine." So why on earth would Apple impede the public's consumption of that service by deleting the music output from its music players? To sell a relatively few clunky headphones?

That's extremely poor strategy, as the market has reached maturity and people are simply bored with the iPhone.

Every investor should take Apple to task for this irresponsible and inexcusable step backward. Not only will Apple lose iPhone sales to this (yes, they will), but it undermines Apple's future business by hampering consumption of its services. This kind of gross misstep should also be punished by the stock market; another loss for investors who are already part owners of Apple.

All the excuses for this blunder are laughable at best. Let's dismantle a few:

1. You can use an adapter.

The asinine adapter isn't the answer, because (aside from having to carry yet another piece of crap around everywhere with your "thin, elegant" iPhone) you can't charge the phone while using it. Want to listen to music on that long road trip while navigating? NOPE.

And good luck replacing that adapter when you lose it on your overseas trip. And if you can, it'll be $30 (or more; we don't know yet).

2. The headphone jack is outdated, like floppy disks and physical media.

This may be the dumbest one. Your ears are analog, and that's not going to change. To hear music, it must at some point be converted from digital data into an analog waveform by a digital-to-analog (D/A) converter. That waveform is used to electrically move a piece of material that moves air against your eardrum. If the music player has a speaker (like every phone), it must contain a D/A converter. So that's not going away; Apple's just denying you the connection to it.

Now Apple wants everyone else to put redundant D/A converters in every listening appliance. Every headset, earbud, car stereo,  home stereo, boombox, hotel-room clock radio, TV, portable amp, PA system. Yeah, this isn't just about headphones. It's about an entire planet's worth of sound reproduction equipment that does and always will have to deliver an analog waveform to your ears.

So no, this is not comparable to abandoning an obsolete format.

3. Removing the headphone jack will allow Apple to make the phone thinner.

This is a crock. The Lightning port is 3mm across. The headphone jack is 3.7mm across. And the iPhone's thickness will be dictated by the protruding camera lens.

We already covered this excuse above, and nobody is campaigning for thinner iPhones. To continue to push this played-out marketing gimmick embarrasses Apple and lends credence to the claim that they're out of ideas.

4. Almost everyone uses wireless headphones, proven by the fact that more wireless ones are sold now.

Lame strawman that only a shut-in would believe. Look around you in the real world. Even at the gym, the vast majority of earphones in use are wired. The sales-figures argument is invalid, because music players and iPhones have come with earbuds, so most people (sadly) will simply put up with them and not buy anything better. It stands to reason that those who do buy additional headphones are likely to buy wireless ones (because they already have wired earbuds, in case I need to spell that out).

But that doesn't matter anyway: The headphone jack doesn't prevent anyone from using wireless or digital headphones.

In the end there simply is no excuse for removing the headphone jack. There are only lame attempts to explain why we shouldn't care.

NBC continues to rip off the public and screw Team USA at the Olympics.

NBC, a broadcaster granted a portion of our public spectrum to transmit content for profit, is once again denying United States viewers access to coverage of their Olympic athletes online. And its excuses embarrass the network and insult the viewers.

So much wrong here. From NBCOlympics.com:

Q: What do I need to watch video on NBCOlympics.com?
A: In order to watch any video on NBCOlympics.com, you must install the latest version of Adobe(R) Flash(R) (supports v10 and above). Adobe(R) Flash(R) will provide you with the best NBC Olympics viewing experience including HD quality video, DVR controls and much more.

That's right people: NBC is still using Flash. That's pathetic by itself, but it also screws mobile users. Oh well!  Don't worry about moving into this decade anytime soon, NBC.



Q: What is required for access to view "Live Streaming" video content?
A: You can access live streams of EVERY NBC Olympics event by authenticating with a cable, satellite or telco TV subscription through your service provider.

Ah yes, the big lie of NBC's proud claim of "streaming every event." Does a bear shit in the woods? Maybe, but if you can't see it, who's to say? Now here's the most insulting part of NBC's fraud:


Q: Why is authentication being required?
A: Authentication supports our ongoing investment in sports programming for all of our platforms and is consistent with industry trends. Digital platforms require significant investment, and authentication allows us to capture the value of that investment, which in turn allows us to continue to provide cable/satellite/telco customers with high-quality sports coverage wherever and whenever they want at no additional cost.

This is absolute bullshit. First off, "consistent with industry trends" means, "other providers are ripping people off, so we're going to try it too."

Then there's "digital platforms require significant investment." Hey NBC, broadcasting went digital a decade ago. What analog distribution are you doing?

Finally, and most damning, there's the fact that NBC sued Aereo, a company that would have expanded NBC's viewership (thus increasing its ratings and the value of its content) by building online infrastructure free of charge to NBC. So NBC is whining about "significant investment" after idiotically attacking a company that was set to do that investment free.

More historic NBC stupidity.

Apple calls you stupid by getting rid of the headphone jack.

Another day, another apologist pretending that this is "progress."

WRONG. Your ears require analog audio waveforms. Those come from headphones or speakers, which move AIR to produce pressure corresponding to those waveforms. There's nothing Apple or anyone else can do at the moment to "progress" beyond that.

So by removing the source of sound from its music-centric phones, Apple will idiotically require redundant conversion hardware in EVERY listening device. Not only will every headphone, car stereo, hotel-room clock radio, boom box, and home stereo have to decode whatever crap-ass protocol Apple will use (which will most likely recompress your already-compressed music), it will then have to do the D/A conversion.

Or... it could be done by the player device ONCE.

Never mind that anyone who cares about sound already has good headphones. And don't even float the turd of, "Well, get an adapter."  Yes, that's classic Apple "elegance:" carrying a wad of adapters and wires around, making your "thin, elegant" iPhone into a Christmas tree of crap because of course you'll need some kind of Y adapter to charge it while listening. Oh, and don't forget all this junk when you go on vacation. Want to play tunes in your rental car?  WOOPS, just when every car has an auxiliary input... Apple makes it useless.

Oh, and never mind that the Lightning port is an embarrassing engineering fiasco that delivers worse quality than the ancient 30-pin port it replaced: https://panic.com/blog/the-lightning-digital-av-adapter-surprise

And finally, if you're all keen on a junked-up, recompressed, battery-sapping, all-digital pipeline to your headphones... you can have it WITHOUT getting rid of the headphone jack. There is no excuse for removing it, period. The "thinness" argument is not only a lie (LOOK at the thing), but it's stupid anyway because nobody asked for a THINNER phone.

Grow a nut and demand better, instead of rolling over and showing your flabby white belly to your corporate masters because it's too uncomfortable for you to admit that Apple is calling you stupid... and you're proving them right.

The Los Angeles Times: Censoring comments to protect its offensive practices and... state cronies?

The L.A. Times implements at least a couple of offensive, anti-reader practices. They launch noise-making ads without user approval, and they inexplicably disable zooming on their mobile site.

That's bad enough. But then they compound the offense by censoring comments that call them out on it. And there's yet more: On top of that, they censor comments that call the state of California out for its rip-offs as well.

Look at this bullshit:

Now what kind of publication is so ashamed of its own work that it bans comments that refer to it? A deliberately deceitful one. There's more:

So this is "journalism" today. It's free, so it's worth nothing. And that's exactly what the L.A. Times delivers and tries to defend. Shoddy work and disgraceful cover-ups, instead of simply fixing the problem.

I guess it is embarrassing when comments provide more information than the "story" above them. Some publications (honorable ones, that is) would use this as incentive to do better. The L.A. Times simply tries to bury the problem.

Hey L.A. Times: Take a lesson from local cats and bury your shit, instead of your readers.

Apple's idiotic "time-zone support" sets users up to miss flights and everything else.

Apple loves to operate in a fantasy world of its own, ignoring reports of glaring defects until they've become embarrassing PR debacles.

This is because Apple doesn't seem to relate to how real people do real things.  For example,  how they use a calendar.

When you book a flight, the airline gives you an itinerary with times on it.

Those times are LOCAL TIMES.  Is there anyone on the planet who thinks that United is putting non-local times on its itineraries, as if you're not going to change your watch or something?  YES: Someone at Apple thinks that.

Consider the craven stupidity of this "logic:" 

So neither of these settings ensures that your iPhone will go off at the specified numeric time shown on the phone's screen.  In fact, it doesn't appear to do anything.  It's incredible: Apple's handheld Unix computer can't do what a $9 alarm clock can.

And yet Apple gets a free pass on grossly defective designs like this, which aren't just cosmetic annoyances.  They cause people to miss important events.  Why do you allow it?

UnitedHealth Group "opting out" of Affordable Care Act? BULLSHIT.

The news is all over mainstream media: United Healthcare will probably bail out of Obamacare.

Let's call this what it is: An outrage to every taxpayer, and intolerable.  It also reveals yet more incompetence in the crafting of this so-called healthcare "reform."

It's bad enough that insurance companies are allowed to sell half-assed policies under Obamacare, policies that care providers can identify as subsidized; those providers usually don't accept them, even when they accept supposedly identical non-subsidized policies.  Care providers should have no knowledge of who's paying for a PPO (for example), and insurance companies should not be allowed to reimburse doctors at different rates simply because of how a client is paying for his insurance.  If Blue Shield has determined that $200 is a fair rate for setting a broken arm, then why would that vary because of how the client is paying for it?

The fact that it's ALLOWED TO means that this healthcare law is corrupt and incompetent.

Now we have a company "opting out."  THAT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL.  It is our country, and these companies do business at our discretion.  The health of this nation should NOT be a for-profit enterprise in the first place.  But it is, and despite the gravy train we taxpayers trowel out to these scumbags, they're now "opting out" of their responsibility to provide what we pay for?

NO WAY.

Look up your Congressional representatives here.

Write to them.  Tell them that we can't stand for companies ripping off our citizens and undermining what little "reform" we've been able to enact.  Tell them that insurance companies should not be allowed to "opt out" of our national healthcare plan, and shouldn't be allowed to sell plans that are identifiable as subsidized or reimburse at different rates because they're subsidized.

Citizens get fined if they "opt out."  So why don't insurance companies?  They should be fined so heavily that it's more economical to simply deliver what they're supposed to be delivering: insurance to all of us.

The fact is that this "reform" didn't go far enough.  We should have abolished for-profit healthcare and detached insurance from people's jobs entirely.  This idiotic association cripples our country and renders all talk of "entrepreneurship" or "small business" a sham, an insult, and monumental hypocrisy.  We can't quit dead-end jobs and start a business or be an entrepreneur when our insurance is still inexplicably tied to OUR JOBS!

Covered California Web site is a defective pile of shit.

I don't even know where to begin excoriating this monumental offense to every California taxpayer.  From beginning to end, there is absolutely no excuse for the incompetence and defectiveness of this Web site, TWO YEARS IN.

This year I was denied a health-insurance subsidy.  Why?  Because I MAKE TOO LITTLE.  That's right: I want to pay for health insurance, but the government is TURNING MY MONEY AWAY.  Now that should offend every taxpayer in the country.

But that's not all.  I actually want to report more income to "qualify" for a subsidy.  But I can't, because the CoveredCA Web site can't do simple math.  Look at this pathetic functionality:

What are we to do when we're denied healthcare because a Web site CAN'T DO MULTIPLICATION?

Oh, but there's more.  You can't even fix this mess because if you change anything, even if it's only your income, you're presented with this baffling (and of course defective) list of alleged changes that you made.  Except, of course, that you didn't make any of them except one:

Yes, this will claim that you changed your coverage, even if you didn't.  And there's no harmless "reason" option to select.  For the other entries, you can just select "other."  But not the change of insurance coverage.  Every available "reason" is potentially disqualifying.

And want to get "help" from Covered California?  Good luck.  The "live chat" button has NEVER worked.  Not once since this debacle launched.

It's unbelievable.  Somebody got paid OUR MONEY to create this inexcusably defective pile of shit. And it has sat there, steaming, for two years.

iPhone pictures and videos are upside-down. Just another embarrassing bug Apple refuses to fix.

We all know that the iPhone and iPad have orientation sensors.  They know which way the camera is turned when you take a picture or video.

Instead of using this information to simply encode the image right-side-up (putting the pixels that belong in the upper-left corner first in the file, and progressing from there), Apple stores the pixels in whatever haphazard orientation the phone is in and sets a metadata flag on the file to record that orientation.  It then becomes the job of every other piece of software on the planet to cater to this flag and rotate the image accordingly when displaying it.

Typical Apple solution.  Instead of simply recording the image right-side-up and thereby enabling any JPEG viewer ever written to show it without a problem, Apple implements a hokey hack and expects everybody to rewrite their applications to pander to it.

According to Apple, this is everybody else's fault.

United Healthcare audits your passwords for swears

You'd think that setting up a user-registration page with reasonable validation rules would be pretty easy.  But as we've seen, there apparently aren't enough sensible people available to do this work.

United Healthcare takes the incompetence to a new level by judging the vulgarity level of your password.  And the best part is that they keep this policy a secret.

So not only does United Healthcare inappropriately examine confidential passwords for their semantic content, but UHC also deliberately wastes customers' time by not telling them why their passwords are rejected time after time, despite following the rules spelled out on the page.

And they know the policy is causing problems, because if you call their support line and tell them your new password is being rejected, the first question they ask is, "Does it contain curse words?"

Of course the appropriate question for you to ask in response is, "What business is it of yours?"

"Responsive design" doesn't mean what you think it means.

For some reason, somebody thought that "responsive" describes a user interface with a flexible layout that fits on screens of varying resolution and aspect ratio.  But it doesn't.  The word "layout" is missing from the phrase "responsive design."  Even "flexible" alone would be far superior to "responsive."

Responses come after events.  The simple presentation of a UI isn't an "event" that hits the UI, because the UI doesn't exist yet; its dimensions and layout have to be determined before it's presented.  THEN it's ready to respond.

A responsive design would be one that responds to user input or other events.

With so many words available to us, why would we label something with such a meaningless (or worse, incorrect) term?

Good GUI design is not skeuomorphism.

Many of us wanted Apple to reverse its embarrassing slide into amateurish, cartoonish interfaces; the much-derided "skeuomorphism."  Unfortunately Apple has also abandoned proper GUI design. Getting rid of tacky, asinine, and incorrect crap like controls disguised as the paint on a blackjack table is good. Getting rid of CONTROLS is stupid, and that is what Apple and Microsoft have done in a great many cases. Disguising controls as static text (or hiding them altogether or relying on secret "gestures") represents total ignorance of what made GUIs "revolutionary" to begin with. If you don't demarcate controls, they might as well not be there. Are users supposed to tap on every letter and glyph on the screen, looking for hidden goodies? Or swipe in every possible direction and every item on every screen? That's sheer stupidity.

"Flat" design suffers from other regressions. If a button is "flat", how do we know what state it's in? If it is rendered as something resembling a real button, it can be "up", depressed, or greyed out. One of its three possible states is clearly and instantly conveyed to the user. But if it's just a colored rectangle, what state is it in?

The question is where all of the decent designers have gone at these companies. Did they just get bored and quit altogether? The regressions at Microsoft and Apple in basic user interfaces just make you wonder how these bad ideas are percolating to the top. There are plenty of things to fix in both companies' products, without this desperate flailing to do something "different." Desperate and defective.

Capital One: We're too stupid to let you know that we didn't get your payment.

UPDATE: After years of customer complaints, Capital One has finally added a notification if your payment hasn't been received two days after its due date.  The bad news is that... it doesn't work.  You can set the notification up, but it isn't sent.  The crack team of IT professionals over there has supposedly been working on this for months, and still hasn't been able to figure out why all the notifications work except for this one.

So, STILL: If Capital One doesn't receive your monthly payment, you won't hear anything about it.  At some point in the future (it appears to be about two and a half weeks), you'll go to use your card and it'll be declined.  The repercussions can range from embarrassing and annoying to disastrous.

The baffling and inexcusable fact here is that Capital One does not (and will not) send you any notification (not even an E-mail) the day after your payment was due, saying "we didn't get it."  The sheer stupidity of this boggles the mind.  They've already applied their late fee, so they've ripped you off there.  They're already charging you interest on the outstanding balance, so they're making money off of you there.  But by simply canceling your card without telling you, they make it impossible for you to use it and make them more money.  You end up using another card (if you're lucky enough to have one on hand), and they lose the sale.

It's essentially FREE to send an E-mail.  It's automated.  They continually send marketing E-mails to customers.  But they absolutely refuse to inform customers of a critical problem with their account.  UNBELIEVABLE.  Oh, wait: Maybe this is just normal Capital One behavior.

Yet another streaming lie from NBC

So this time NBC claimed to be streaming the hockey finals.  I went to their site to check it out.

There wasn't even a way to attempt to get the stream.  No viewer, no link to "watch now", nothing.  Worse yet, the NBC banner at the top indicates that you have to sign up for a free trial.  Look at this disgraceful scam:

For the "free trial" rip-off, NBC has teamed up with some lowlives called "BombGame."  Not surprisingly, your "free" trial will cost you $40 a month after five days.  But the best part is that if you attempt to cancel your membership, BombGame threatens to charge you a $1 "convenience fee" TO CANCEL.  Look at these scumbags:

NBC and BombGame: teaming up to lie and rip you off.  Why should we be surprised, after the Olympic streaming sham?

Time-Warner cable: "We're stupid and we don't have any reasons for it."

I got fed up with not being able to access Time-Warner hotspots, which we're supposed to have access to as part of being a Time-Warner cable Internet customer.  I wind up dealing with this when there's a hotspot where I happen to be, and it breaks the iPhone's Internet connectivity.  The iPhone will automatically connect to an "open" Wi-Fi network, and then sit there stupidly even though you can't get data through it; it's supposed to fall back to cellular, but it doesn't.  Longstanding iPhone bug.

So instead of manually deactivating Wi-Fi all the time, I figured I'd enter my credentials on the TWC log-in page and be done with it.  But this page demands that you log in with an E-mail address (we all know by now how stupid that is).  Even worse is that the E-mail address it wants is the auto-generated one that's associated with your account internally at Time-Warner, in the form of "thomson9063@socal.rr.com".  How the hell would I know what that is?  And of course there's no way to find out what it is AT THE HOTSPOT, because you inexplicably can't gain access to your account.

You can't even use the password-reset option, because...

If only we could follow that instruction.

And when you come home, you can't use the hotspot help because you're not accessing it through a hotspot.  RETARDED.  So I tried to contact TWC about this, but their "contact us" link goes to a 404. This is an Internet access provider:

So I had to resort to the online chat.  Here's the illuminating transcript of my chat with a Time-Warner rep (this was my third chat session after being escalated, after two phone calls and three E-mails and probably an hour and a half).

Rodney:    Hello! Thank you for choosing Road Runner Internet Technical Chat Support. My name is Rodney, I will help you.

Rodney:    How are you doing today?

ME:    I am a bit tired of dealing with TWC.

Rodney:    I am sorry to know that.

Rodney:    We really apologize for the inconvenience.

ME:    Well, let's get it resolved.

ME:    First off, your "contact us" link is broken, and has been broken for some time.  How does this go unaddressed?

Rodney:    We are aware of it and our engineers are working on it to fix this issue.

ME:    Second, I have repeatedly tried to use TWC wi-fi hotspots, and I m asked for credentials that I had no way of knowing.

ME:    The log-in page demands the auto-generated E-mail address that is associated with my account, but gives you no way to find out what it is.

What you see when you try to use a Time-Warner hotspot.

Rodney:    I will provide you with the necessary information.

Rodney:    In order to access TWC Wi-FI you need to use Primary Road Runner email address and the password.

ME:    I have the information now.  Not yesterday when I was in a seminar and needed Web access.

ME:    I have never seen this E-mail address before, and I do not use it to access my account.  Why on earth do I need to use it at a hotspot?

Rodney:    I understand your concern, in order to access TWC Hotspot you need to use Road Runner email address and the passwords. This is for TWC customers only.

ME:    Why can't I use the same credentials I use to access my account at home?

Rodney:    Here is the reason:  you need to use Primary Email address and the Password to access TWC Hotspots.

ME:    You're simply repeating the problem.  WHY?  I NEVER use (or even knew) that E-mail address, and yet every month I can log into TWC and pay my bill, change services, and see my personal info.

ME:    I have a log-in ID with Time-Warner cable, and yet I can't use this to log into its hotspots.  WHY?

Rodney:    We can't use it. We can't use My-Servics account login information to access TWC Hotspots. It won't work. Only Road Runner email address and the password works with TWC Hotspot.

ME:    WHY?

Rodney:    We do not have any reasons for it. TWC Hotspots are designed in such a way that, users can only login with there Road Runner email address and the password. It is a default thing. We can't change it.

ME:    But users have no way of knowing WHAT that E-mail address is.  It's auto-generated by Time-Warner.  The hotspot page gives you no way to find out what it is.  This is asinine.

Rodney:    I will provide you with the Road Runner email address and the password

ME:    That doesn't help people AFTER THE FACT, now does it?  I'm not at the hotspot anymore.  I couldn't access it.

ME:    And then when you come home, the TWC hotspot page says you can't access it from home.

Rodney:    We can only access TWC Hotspots when you are outside the home and near to the TWC Hotspot. We can't access it from home.

Rodney:    I will report your feedback to our higher levels and make sure they will look into it.

ME:    OK. Thanks.

And this was after an even dumber E-mail exchange.  Here was my initial support inquiry and TW's follow-up:

Question: I have repeatedly set up a TWC Wi-Fi user ID. It doesn't work.

Your online help chat DOESN'T WORK. Your "support" link on the TWCWiFi log-in page goes BACK TO THE LOG-IN PAGE.

And if I go home to try to get support from my Time-Warner cable connection, I'm told I can't get support for TWCWiFi through my regular connection. So how am I supposed to use TWC hotspots? I'm tired of this month after month.

Thank you for contacting Time Warner Cable, Road Runner email Support.

I will assist you with the information.
...
To login to wifi hot spot, follow the steps:-

1. Use your device's wireless connection finder to locate TWCWiFi (SSID) hotspots nearby. Consult our Coverage Map if the TWCWiFi does not appear.
2. Connect to TWCWifi and a sign-in page will appear.
3. Enter your Road Runner email address and password.
4. Agree to the terms of service.
5. Click on Sign In.

Yep: When I told Time-Warner I couldn't log into a hotspot, they told me to log into a hotspot.

NBC's Olympic lie

It's bad enough that the Olympics are spoiled for United States viewers by NBC's abysmal coverage.  Unless you choose not to read the news for two weeks, you don't have any reason to watch the Olympics by the time NBC finally gets around to broadcasting them eight or 10 hours late.

NBC further insults Americans by claiming that they're streaming events live.

Nope.  Take a look at where this lie breaks down.

Now why should I log in with some "TV provider's" credentials, when NBC is a publicly viewable network funded by ADVERTISING?  Yep, aside from making us wonder what a "form video" is, this screen is a harbinger of bullshit to come.  And it comes quickly:

So much for Net Neutrality and NBC's fraud.  NBC not only rips off American viewers, but it rips off its own sponsors by inexplicably denying them millions of additional viewers.  Hell, NBC is ripping off itself by reducing its measurable audience and the value of its content along with it.

Sponsors should boycott NBC as long as NBC intentionally reduces its audience and insults American viewers with this sham.

Oh, and as a final stroke of incompetence, that "Learn more/FAQ" link on the initial screen takes you to a video that you can't watch.  It goes right back to the "We're Sorry" screen above.  What it should say is "We're too stupid to understand our own business model."

Jim Bell, the executive producer of NBC's so-called Olympics coverage, smugly comments to Hollywood Reporter:

"We can understand and appreciate that people are passionate about things," says Jim Bell. "I think the numbers speak for themselves."

Um, no.  No they don't.  Maybe you can tell us what other options you think viewers had, Mr. Bell.  Against what competing Olympics coverage did NBC earn these numbers?  We'll be holding our breath for your answer, genius.

UPDATE: NBC pulled this same scam again, but even worse.

UPDATE 2016: NBC is ripping off the public and screwing Team USA again.

Capital One: We don't care about your security, identity, or business.

For the third time in eight months or so, Capital One suddenly started declining my purchases, for the same reason: A merchant's security was compromised and my card number was exposed.

Not once did Capital One even bother to send me an E-mail, let alone call me.  They knew my card number was compromised, and that quite possibly other aspects of my identity were open to theft as a result.  But they didn't even have their automated system send me an E-mail about this security breach.

It's hard to overstate how irresponsible and offensive this is.  But that's not all; Capital One, every time, capped off the offense by proposing to send my replacement card through the regular mail in five to seven days.

A great many people, millions I'm sure, make thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for credit-card companies every year.  I make Capital One plenty of money, and yet after I'm inconvenienced and prevented from making them money, they're not going to FedEx my new card.  They're going to lazily plop it in the old U.S. mail along with some marketing fliers and maybe some utility payments or magazine cards from people working at the processing center.

And if you complain about this insult (which you should), you'll still be told that the best they can do is an "expedited" delivery in two to three days.  Yes, it's as if they have no idea exactly when this goddamned thing is going to arrive, in 2012.  Are they attaching it to a flying burro?  A capricious cherub?  If you can't figure out how to get a document to a customer in exactly two days, go out of business.  NOW.

And while Capital One is dicking around, I have to wait to go through every service I use and every bill I pay and change the credit card I have on file.  And inevitably I'm going to miss one or two and have payments declined.

Can we continue to hand money to assholes like this and retain any self respect?