ISPs can be nice (if cats are involved)

-
From The Consumerist, we have the following Cat On Router story
Liam, from England, has a cat that likes to sleep on his router clobbering his network connection.  He pinged his ISP, and got the following response (italics mine)
 Dear Liam,
I'm contacting you regarding your post on our forum.
For many years this issue has bothered our customers. As you can see in the tread [sic] it is not only the BeBox susceptible to such feline interferences. We have brainstormed this for a few hours, but regrettably we were unable to find any plausible solution.
We decided to send you a decoy router as you requested, however we will need some proof that the cat in the picture is a real one. Can you please send us more cute pictures of the aggressor.
Also we will need appropriate address for the decoy router to be sent.
Please be aware that in case you decide to cancel your service we will not be able to leave the decoy router with you and you will have to discuss this matter with your new ISP.
 A lesson there somewhere for Comcast / Verizon / pretty much every ISP in the US...





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

-
Image
The nice thing about garbage-collection is that it is makes memory management absolutely transparent to you Of course, the above is true right up to the point when it stops being transparent, at which point it does a phase change from nice to clusterf**k of biblical proportions .  There are entire posts, books, and suicide notes that have been written about this, and I have no great desire to add to them, save with the minor comment that paranoia about garbage-collection is still justified , albeit only in the edge-cases for most people. That said, I'll give you that Erlang GC is in many ways much, much better positioned in this regard than, oh, Java, but it still rears up and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. ( More information about Erlang's GC vis-a-vis Java here , and Jesper's truly excellent description of Erlang's GC here ).  A story from the past should serve to illustrate this. Once upon a time, in a magical land far far away - well, Her...
Read more

Spot The Difference — Deep Learning Edition

-
Image
You’ve played  Spot The Difference  at some point, right? (Of course you did. We  all  did  ). Think about what you actually did when you were trying to Spot The Difference — in fact, just do it again with SpongeBob juggling above. You’re probably doing something like 1. Quick glance to the left. 2. Quick glance to the right 3. “ Spatula on the left. Wonder if there is one on the right? ” 4. “ Yup, there is. Sriracha on the right. Is that on the left? ” 5. “ Nope! It’s a ketchup bottle on the left! And there is nothing on the plate below it! ” etc. To summarize, what you’re basically doing is looking at each image alternately, identifying objects in each image, and trying to find the same object in the other image. As it turns out, what most Deep Learning systems do is something quite different. They basically do something like this 1. Figure out everything in the first image (“ ketchup bottle at 1 o-clock, empty plate at 3 o-clock, spatula at 1...
Read more