GeekNights Monday - When Internet Services Die

MrPeriod

Tonight on GeekNights, we consider what happens when Internet services die (like we assume Flickr and Google Voice will). In the news, there are rumors that Twitter will drop @user and #hashtag characters, e-cigarettes are as terrible for you as one should assume, and people are poisoning themselves with e-cigarette liquids in unsurprising numbers. Also, if you have Verizon FIOS, you have to buy your own damn battery. If you didn't notice it beeping for the last several months, you should get your ears checked out.

We'll be at Zenkaikon and PAX East! The GeekNights Book Club book is Wool!

• Shake Hands with Danger Remix
• Shake Hands with Danger
• Recovering Corrupt SD Cards

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Churba

Better article about the E-cig thing at Discovery, though inferior in the sense that it doesn't explicitly support one position that they're literally horrendous poison and you will die because of them, just like alcohol, or the air in New York. Unfortunately, neither actually contain any solid numbers.

Abstract is here, but you need to buy the article to get the full text if you don't already have BMJ access. Considering that single day access is twenty pounds, though, I can't blame you if you don't.

Matt

Man, I laughed my ass off when Rym said that any company without an active social media presence is doomed to die. I listened to this episode after reading about how Games Workshop just deleted all of its Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Apreche

Matt said:

Man, I laughed my ass off when Rym said that any company without an active social media presence is doomed to die. I listened to this episode after reading about how Games Workshop just deleted all of its Facebook and Twitter accounts.

LOLOLOLOL

Anthony Heman

I actually havn't kept up with the e-cig thing at-all. I saw a guy quizzing a gas station attendant on which of a variety of them they had cartridges for last week. That's the closest I've been to actually interacting with them. If they are unsafe, why? I mean, I really know NOTHING about them. Couldn't you manufacture something like it that was safe? Not that anybody needs such a thing, but whatever.

Rym

There's not way to make them "safe" as at their core, they're used to consume variously harmful chemicals via one's lungs.

Anthony Heman

So, are they regulated by the FDA? Or what?

Anthony Heman

Wikipedia. Informing me every day.

Churba

Rym said:

There's not way to make them "safe" as at their core, they're used to consume variously harmful chemicals via one's lungs.

Fair point, but on the other hand, you could also regulate them so that they contain what they say they contain, in the proper amounts, and with a reasonably low level of contaminants, particulates, etc, etc. You can't make them perfectly safe, but you can make them safe to a reasonable degree, in the same way that you can generally be assured that liquor you buy from the store won't send you fucking blind. And I'm all for restricting them in similar ways to, say, alcohol and cigarettes, considering that the main purpose is indeed to suck harmful chemicals into your lungs, just less of them and with different flavors to most other methods of sucking harmful things into your lungs.

At the moment, the best you can do is buy from a reputable place that uses food-grade ingredients and is transparent about what they put into their fluids - but even that's no guarantee, because food grade does not nessissarily mean sucking-into-your-lungs grade.

HMTKSteve

An associate of mine is going to college for some form of chemistry degree. He is also making and selling his own concoction for e-cigs. I would ask him about joing a podcast to discuss but he has social issues and would not enjoy being grilled about e-cigs.

George Patches

Rym said:

There's not way to make them "safe" as at their core, they're used to consume variously harmful chemicals via one's lungs.

It boils down to this, even if they were pure nicotine (which they aren't) it turns out that nicotine is really bad for you (and cancer causing). We've sort of been brought up hear about all the bad other things in regular cigarettes, but nicotine is plenty bad for you by itself.

George Patches

First it doesn't post until approved, now it double posts? WTF?!?

rcabr

My Fios battery has been dead for two years. Eventually you just tune out the beep.

Matt

I must have been lucky. I moved into a house with a beeping FiOS battery in 2011 and the guy who came to set up our service switched it out for me.

Apreche

George Patches said:

First it doesn't post until approved, now it double posts? WTF?!?

I manual approved.

George Patches

Apreche said:

George Patches said:

First it doesn't post until approved, now it double posts? WTF?!?

I manual approved.

Yeah, it double posted what you approved. VANILLA!!!

johndis

I think its pretty stupid that there can be an inhaled drug product thats widely available and its not just automatically regulated by the FDA, like theres a discussion of whether or not they should. Also there is, interestingly enough, a lot of lobbying/research pressure from GlaxoSmithKline to make e-cigs look bad + be outright banned.

Rym

On one side, we have big tobacco trying to regulate it to the point that ONLY they can play.

On the other side, we have shady people trying to keep it unregulated so they can sell unregulated poison at a high markup without consequences.

johndis

Big pharma is actually one of the bigger players at the moment, e-cigs compete really directly with nicotine gums and patches.

TheWhaleShark

johndis said:

I think its pretty stupid that there can be an inhaled drug product thats widely available and its not just automatically regulated by the FDA

But we can't do that, because socialism. The free market will fix it. We just need lots of people to die first, and then people will know not to use it!

Matt said:

Man, I laughed my ass off when Rym said that any company without an active social media presence is doomed to die. I listened to this episode after reading about how Games Workshop just deleted all of its Facebook and Twitter accounts.

This both surprises me and doesn't. GW has always had a tenuous relationship with electronic sales and presence in general - they're the guys who stopped shipping to anyone who sold their products online using a "shopping cart" checkout system.

The company has always survived via word of mouth, but deleting your electronic presence is pretty much just as good as having people stop talking about you.

Matt

Yeah we're even talking down to the social media accounts of the local Games Workshop stores. Good luck promoting a local business when you're not allowed to touch the internet. GW isn't going to die tomorrow. They can fuck up again and again (as they have been), but they can leech off that core fanbase for quite a while. All this is doing is making sure there is no replacement fanbase down the road, and that nobody even notices when GW goes away. It will just fade off.

Hitman Hart

Archive.org would be a fantastic place to store Geeknights podcast and video archives if you wanted one, and it's free because you put Creative Commons on all your stuff

Coldguy

I got FIOS sans battery since I did not get a land line added to the package.

Apreche

Coldguy said:

I got FIOS sans battery since I did not get a land line added to the package.

Even if you don't get a landline, FIOS is still required to have a battery because it still has phone jacks. Any phone jack or mobile phone, even ones that aren't being paid for, are required by law to be able to make 911 calls. Normal landline phones get power from the phone company which has backup generators. All other phones are required to have batteries.

HMTKSteve

If those phone jacks are not active you do not get a battery.

Rym

My phone jacks are not and were never active. I was given the battery anyway, and had no option to not get the battery.

Apreche

Rym said:

My phone jacks are not and were never active. I was given the battery anyway, and had no option to not get the battery.

It may not be connected to the phone jacks around the apartment, but there is a phone jack on that FIOS box in the closet. If you connect a phone to it, you can call 911.

HMTKSteve

Not necessarily. I have phone jacks on my telco router and they were dead until I paid for a POTS line.

Mobile phones are different than wired lines. Wireline only works if it is wired back to a central office just as a mobile phone will only provide 911 If there is a cell tower nearby.

Churba

So, this is new There's been a recent literature review that found somewhat differently to the story you linked.

HMTKSteve

Churba said:

So, this is new There's been a recent literature review that found somewhat differently to the story you linked.

ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross, a close follower of the e-cigarette literature and regulatory scene, commented as follows: “Prof. Burstyn’s comprehensive analysis should help put to rest the good-faith concerns of some in the anti-smoking community who continue to doubt the safety of e-cigarettes’ ‘second-hand vapor.’ Unfortunately, for the bulk of the harm-reduction haters, this will probably have little impact, since they are refractory to science-based discussion, fixated as they are on their various perverse agendas.”

Apreche

Churba said:

So, this is new There's been a recent literature review that found somewhat differently to the story you linked.

Well, now I do t know what to believe, but I hope this study is the true one.