If it's a commercial website it's fine in.com no matter where it's located.
I realize that, and I don't like it. Frankly I feel the whole registrar process is horribly borked. As I've said before, the registrars get off with no liability whatsoever, even when they repeatedly sell domains to known criminals for criminal purposes. With the right accreditation, a registrar can exist in a different country (even under a TLD other than.com), sell.com domains, and then pretend to not speak English when encountered over their willingness to sell to criminals.
Could new TLDs solve this? Probably not. But I like to think that someone cares enough about the problem to look into some sort of solution.
I'll stop complaining now, and watch this comment get modded down.
Just pushing for people / companies to actually register in the appropriate TLD's for their country? As it is, there's nothing to prevent you from purchasing a.com domain from a registrar in China, for a website to host in China. If we actually tethered the website domains to the countries they reside in, then we may be able to reign in the never-ending "canadian pharmacy" spam campaign that pushes out zillions of spams per second.
In the US you cannot use a radio station for "music on hold". You can find lots of stuff about this all over. You either need to pay ASCAP fees or find something else to put on your phone system.
As I already said, I am not a lawyer. I don't remember why we were allowed to use that one particular station and no others. Perhaps that station was paying the fees out of the kindness of their own hearts? It may also be worthwhile to point out I was working for a non-profit newspaper...
I worked at a newspaper back in 2000-2002. We wanted to just use local radio music for our hold music, but our attorney informed us that we couldn't do that with "just any station". I, of course, am not a lawyer, so I don't know how the decision was made from that point. But in the end, it turned out that a local station owned by clear channel was OK to use for hold music. We didn't have to pay them for it, AFAIK.
What was ironic was that this was a "progressive rock" station. Granted, they never played anything explicit, but still, I'm sure there are some people who might be bothered by listening to it while on hold. We would have expected it would be kinder to the customers to chose an easy listening station or something, but that station wasn't allowed legally.
So in the end, there's nothing special about this case, just that for some reason it happens to be getting attention right now. Without reading the article I'd guess that someone just wasn't familiar with how the copyright laws work for this.
It doesn't surprise me in the least that my original comment is ranked with a score of 1. Being as this thread is all about how great filters are, I would expect that my insistence of filters being the wrong solution would fare poorly. Call it elitism or whatever you want, I know I'm pushing for an unpopular cause.
This is very similar to the discussion I had some time ago when the topic was on the anonymity of WHOIS data. I was arguing for it to always be available, while many others were saying that registrars should be able to obfuscate it for their customers. Needless to say, I see that as a spam-related issue as well, and my point of view is not generally well accepted by many others
the sordid reality is that email is *NOT* free and never has been free I couldn't agree more with that statement. And as the volume of total email traversing the internet goes up, so does the cost of sending it, when viewed in the light of traffic and hardware needs. Filters save essentially zilch on these costs, as the email has already made most of its journey by the time the filter takes action.
Yet some people either don't acknowledge, or refuse to acknowledge, that filters are solving the wrong problem.
so much of it is clearly illegal and yet it is so clearly public I've seen that as well. Most of the spam I get is pushing prescription drugs or obviously pirated software. Of course when we don't know where the criminals are actually located, it becomes very difficult to have any legal action taken against them. And if they really are in Tahiti / Russia / China / Zimbabwe, then good luck with that, as obviously US laws have about zero jurisdiction in any of those places.
As I've said before, spam is a problem because it has an economic incentive for the spammers. The real solution is not to keep changing email acceptance rules through yet another filter rule change, but to remove the economic incentive through real action. If they can't sell their crap, they'll move on. As long as its still easy for them to do, they will keep doing it.
Sorry, you still aren't making sense. Spammers having to work harder is a bad thing? And they are happily working around filters? They are making money by working around the filters. The more filters they work around, the more product they can sell.
The bandwidth problem and the user-hassling problem are two different problems with a single root cause So then why are you only willing to consider solutions to one problem? The two problems can be solved together, rather than solving one and ignoring the other. Spam will continue to consume more bandwidth over time as long as its economical advantageous for the spammers to sendit out.
I replied saying that my efforts in filtering have been very effective. It has been effective only in the context of your number of users. And what has it done to prevent the spam from being sent? Nothing. The spam still traversed the internet from the originating mail server (another problem) and was then rejected in some way once it reached your network. And being as the spammers likely don't track whether any amount of their spam reaches any destination, your filters are trivial from their perspective.
And making it better for users is "futile"? It is futile in terms of actually trying to proactively stop spam. It does nothing to control spam-driven internet traffic. It does nothing to deter spammers from sending spam.
You don't honestly believe that for some reson filters would cause spammers to send less spam, do you?
My filters? I don't come up with my own filters, I use common anti-spam filters that are used by many people, including ISPs. I never accused you of creating anything. I merely used the term your to indicate that you have them. You created them is completely irrelevant.
All the spam that is filtered out on behalf of my clients is spam that my clients could have bought from. The incentive is diminished by every spam that could have made it to a willing recipient but did not. And how many customers do you have? Honestly, even if you have hundreds of customers, thats only a small drop in the bucket compared to how many people the spammers hit every day. And how do you know that none of your customers have any other email addresses? Are you sure none of them have hotmail/yahoo/gmail addresses that may be seeing spam there?
This makes no sense. Without the filters, they would still be willing suckers. That was in regards to the suckers who the spammers need to work just a little harder to get to. The spammers know those people are out there, and will happily work around common filters to get to them. Hence the filters are compounding the problem because they only cause the spammers to get more creative.
but that doesn't mean that spam filters don't solve problems in a very real way Spam filters do nothing to actually prevent the spam from happening, though, Which means that the spam still has very real costs, even if it doesn't get through. It costs bandwidth, it costs time.
Have you ever maintained a mail server Yes, I have. Have you ever been a LAN admin? Have you ever tracked the bandwidth that a domain consumes just in the process of taking in and rejecting spam? The spammers are costing you money even when you don't see their junk email.
all the spammers in the world find a new technique and implement it together. You don't need all of them. You don't need many of them at all, in fact. If even just one figures it out you need to go back and spend more time revising your rules. At which point they've already cost you money and time.
better for users and worse for spammers The disagreement here is that you're willing to work on only one. I want a solution that does both. A filter really doesn't make it worse for spammers, even if it does make it better for users. Its not like your filters actually have any real effect on the spammers themselves - they don't really care how much email goes through, as long as some of it does. And unless you want to implement your wonderful filters for the entire world, then the spammers will always get something through.
The spam problem has been addressed by reactive "solutions" for years now. We've all seen it just continue to get worse. I want a proactive solution to spam. No filter in the world could ever be proactive, because it can't take the incentive away from the spammers.
She turned and said that only old people use email. And she was a VENDOR at the conference.... Things that make you go hmmmmmmmm......
That's when I shake my cane at her and tell her I won't be buying anything from her company...
And how is the registrar to know that the person registering the domain will pretend not to speak English later on? Do registrars have crystal balls, or what?
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I could care less whether or not the person to whom the domain is registered is willing to speak English or not. I was talking instead about whether or not the registrar of US-based TLD's will actually speak english. For example, I have seen that spammers are enjoying the registrar services of bizcn.com. If you go to their website, there is virtually no English on it. But yet the registration data they make available for the.com domains that they sell is in English. Though if you try to contact them about a spamming domain that they sold to a known criminal, their reply is (shockingly) a canned response in Chineese.
So no, I don't care what kind of balls the registrars have. Indeed, I would say they have too large of cajones already. I'd like to see some castration done to get them in line to help remove the economic incentive that they make for the spammers.
I dunno. I've been pretty spam-free for the past several years using mimedefang, milter-greylist, and spamassassin.
Except that the mail has already been delivered to your network at that point. So I would say we've already lost. Even if you aren't using any significant CPU time at that point, you're still wasting bandwidth. The spam has already traversed the internet to get to you. Even if you didn't acknowledge that it got to you, it still came in.
So really, we need to ask why it was sent to begin with...
As much as we'd like to say it was because of some evil-doer who we would like to see strung out on 1st street ala the old days of the London Bridge, it is simpler than that.
It was sent to you because of the potential to make money. Spam is still big business for a certain number of people. Obviously we'll never 100% of people who use the internet to stop buying from spam, and even 99.99999% isn't close enough to remove the incentive from the spammers.
The only way to win against spam is to take away the profitability. And all the filtering in the world can never accomplish that.
Can it stop all spam? No. Do filters have to adapt? Yes. But that hardly means that filtering is futile, it just means that it's not as easy as we'd all like it to be.
I would say that indicates that filters are losing the war on spam, because the spammers just find new ways around them. Its not about whats easy. I'm not looking for an easy solution, I'm looking for a solution that will actually work.
And a working solution would have to remove the incentive behind spam. Your filters do nothing to remove the incentive. One could even argue that filters add incentive to spammers, because they know that there are plenty of joe users with machines that have simple geek-squad-installed spam filtering, who just might be willing suckers if the spam can get through.
Hence, filtering does nothing to stop the problem. Its a band-aid for a gushing head wound. Just because you can hide from spam, and turn your back to it for a few weeks until the spammers find a way past your newest algorithm doesn't mean that you're winning at all. Indeed, we're all losing because the spammers are still making enough money to pay for registration and hosting costs. As well as their addresses in Tahiti, Finland, China, and Siberia.
I'm frankly rather baffled at the lengths that people will go to in order to try to {filter / reject / stop transmission of} spam. We've already seen for years that such efforts are futile, because the same spammers will just adapt and find a way to pump out their crap anyways.
I have said before, and am saying again, we need an economic solution to an economic problem.
The spammers continue to send out spam becuase they make money at it. If we can make it less profitable for them, then they'll stop doing it. However, the spammers have so many partners in crime that we can't easily hinder them until at least one of their cohorts will agree to work on the right side of the law.
The way I see it, we still should be going after the registrars. A good chunk of the spam comes from a small portion of the spammers (and their gangs). We know who these people are, and so do the registrars. But currently, we just play the same game ad naseum:
Spammer registers adress
Spammer sends out bazillions of v!@gra / $0ftw@re spams
Some number of idiots buy said illegal products
Eventually domain gets shut down
Spammer buys new domains from same registrar
And the game repeats. And the only party who can easily be contacted about it is the registrar - who will of course deny all wrong doing, or just hide behind the security of whatever communist country they reside in this week.
If registration was instead restricted to actual respectable registrars (at least for common TLDs) then a lot of this could be short-circuited.
Instead, we allow registrars who don't speak English (or at least claim to not speak English when you contact them) to sell.com domains, which are used to sell illegal products to foolish customers here in the US. If the registrars had some degree of decency, they wouldn't keep supporting the criminals - but since they get a cut of the action, there's no good incentive for them not to.
I've seen that firsthand myself. I'm working on my PhD in biochemistry, and I know another student in my department who is months away from his defense. He came here from China, and speaks excellent English. But yet he has not been able to obtain citizenship. This actually has larger problems than just retention, because non-citizens cannot apply for grant money from most federal agencies, which of course makes a career in academia unlikely.
As the previous post said, these are the very people we should want most.
Think I can comment pretty well on this, with the experience that I have had with portables over the years. Amongst many hats I've worn, I was selling PDAs / ultraportables for CompUSA back when they were a publicly traded company (the bad ol' days).
I found that customers fell into several different classifications:
Customers who wanted to replace their laptop with something smaller with a keyboard
Toshiba Libretto?
HP 360lx?
Psion 7?
Customers who wanted something small to track appointments, etc
Palm 3?
Palm 5?
Cheap knock-off?
Customers who wanted something portable with good communications capabilities
palm VII?
(We were able to watch our stock prices fall in real-time on this one!)
Customers who were gadget geeks and wanted something that looked cool
Palm V?
Sony VAIO (the picturebook)?
You can't meet all of these criteria with one device. Hell, you can hardly even meet any two of these with one device. And that was a big part of the problem, was that the manufacturers wanted to sell one device - or one line of very similar devices - to every customer.
But yet it still seemed that the manufacturers measured the success of their devices by comparing to PC sales, which was idiotic to say the least. Therefore many of the systems that had solid markets, if they weren't made by 3com/USR (or Palm after I left), either weren't carried in stores long enough to sell, or weren't carried at all. Hell, the Libretto I only learned of through a customer of ours who came in and asked why we were carrying the picturebook but not the Libretto, when very few customers cared about the lousy camera on the Sony.
Basically, my conclusion is that the market has killed itself off. There is room for diversity, but where is it? There isn't any. Basically you buy a palm, or a winCE copy of one, or you don't buy anything reasonably portable at all. What happened to the clamshell units that had tiny keyboards AND fit in your pocket? They're gone, likely to never be seen again. What happened to running PDA's on AA / AAA batteries? After all, some travelers don't always have 4 power adapters with them for everything they use while on the road...
I'm not sure how my comment was redundant. Perhaps if there was a 'smart-ass' tag, I could understand that. But redundant? With what? I was trying to point out that the slashdot introduction for the article was written poorly - namely that someone left a tag hanging open that mucked up the meaning of the intro for me and the 4 other slashdot readers who don't play half-life.
interesting stories like Portal to come out of Valve as they trickle out what they refer internally to as 'The [Half-Life] Bible.'"
Either the title of the game is "Portal to come out of Valve as they trickle out what they refer internally to as 'The [Half-Life] Bible.'", or someone forgot to close a tag. I know I won't be the first to call the local retailer asking about availability on a game with a title that is 19 words long.
seven(!) months since 1969 when the USD/AUD exchange rate is equivalent to Lego's purported exchange rate (and they were all in 2001.) Maybe they think we're all backward yokels that don't understand such complex things as foreign exchange rates....
Did you consider that perhaps they made their pricing decision in 2001? Obviously I don't sit on the board at Lego, so I can't tell you how often they may decide to adjust their pricing for international markets. Nor do I know how large or small the Australian market is. But perhaps, just perhaps, they may have felt that the 6 year old exchange rate was close enough.
And beyond that, we're not even considering the additional costs of getting it to you. If Lego's are all made in Europe, they need to then get them to you in Australia in some manner, and there aren't any options for doing that which I would expect to be both quick and affordable. And then of course there are tarriffs to pay as well...
Someone else pointed out that US prices are before tax, and many other countries are after tax. Most states charge sales tax in the US on the range of 6-10% - which could of course be up to $50 for this item. If you take that into consideration before accusing the company of gouging, you may see that their prices aren't all that bad.
And if it really irks you that much, you can always try to find an importer of your own to deal with it - pay the American price and then deal with Australian customs once it gets to you. That may or may not be worth the effort, I have no way to tell you that.
Also, I'll point out that its not all milk and honey up here, either. When I was looking for deposit accounts up here, I found your banks are paying about twice the interest (or better) than ours. So while our economy up here is currently geared towards importing and spending, you folks have a decisive upper hand on low-risk investment.
Yes indeed, these rolling stones have gathered plenty of moss since they first started touring in their Ford Model A's back in the 1920's.
However, we have learned something from them. As Bill Maher said in his show:
Airplane black boxes must now be made out of Keith Richards. The man, who has taken more drugs than Whitney Houston, Rush Limbaugh and Robert Downey, Jr., combined, recently fell out of a tree, and then crashed a jet ski. And yet, somehow, that cigarette never fell out of his mouth. What is this guy still running on? I've got to know. Because I'm beginning to think the future of medicine isn't injecting stem cells, it's injecting heroin.
I don't think I would call that gouging. Most companies that do business in mutliple countries, using multiple currencies, only do conversions every year or less. A good example can be found at your local newsstand - next time you're there, pick up a magazine. Most magazines sold in the US (at least in Northern states) have prices in US and Canadian dollars. But most of them are based on old conversions of $1US = $1.25CA. Some are even worse, based on $1US = $1.50CA.
Ultimately, though, they are probably most concerned about getting their margins right for the US price, since it may well be their largest market. Even when the US economy is rocky, it is still a country with hundreds of millions of consumers, and a pretty significant per capita wealth.
Hmmm, I guess the answer really was as obvious as it appeared. I expected I was missing out on something here and the furries were some specific type of trekkie critter.
I don't get it. Who exactly do the "Furries" represent? I am familiar with the Klingons, but if the Furries represent some group in particular, I have no clue who that would be...
Slashdot Mirror
I realize that, and I don't like it. Frankly I feel the whole registrar process is horribly borked. As I've said before, the registrars get off with no liability whatsoever, even when they repeatedly sell domains to known criminals for criminal purposes. With the right accreditation, a registrar can exist in a different country (even under a TLD other than
Could new TLDs solve this? Probably not. But I like to think that someone cares enough about the problem to look into some sort of solution.
I'll stop complaining now, and watch this comment get modded down.
Just pushing for people / companies to actually register in the appropriate TLD's for their country? As it is, there's nothing to prevent you from purchasing a .com domain from a registrar in China, for a website to host in China. If we actually tethered the website domains to the countries they reside in, then we may be able to reign in the never-ending "canadian pharmacy" spam campaign that pushes out zillions of spams per second.
As I already said, I am not a lawyer. I don't remember why we were allowed to use that one particular station and no others. Perhaps that station was paying the fees out of the kindness of their own hearts? It may also be worthwhile to point out I was working for a non-profit newspaper...
I knew of this problem at my own work years ago.
I worked at a newspaper back in 2000-2002. We wanted to just use local radio music for our hold music, but our attorney informed us that we couldn't do that with "just any station". I, of course, am not a lawyer, so I don't know how the decision was made from that point. But in the end, it turned out that a local station owned by clear channel was OK to use for hold music. We didn't have to pay them for it, AFAIK.
What was ironic was that this was a "progressive rock" station. Granted, they never played anything explicit, but still, I'm sure there are some people who might be bothered by listening to it while on hold. We would have expected it would be kinder to the customers to chose an easy listening station or something, but that station wasn't allowed legally.
So in the end, there's nothing special about this case, just that for some reason it happens to be getting attention right now. Without reading the article I'd guess that someone just wasn't familiar with how the copyright laws work for this.
This is very similar to the discussion I had some time ago when the topic was on the anonymity of WHOIS data. I was arguing for it to always be available, while many others were saying that registrars should be able to obfuscate it for their customers. Needless to say, I see that as a spam-related issue as well, and my point of view is not generally well accepted by many others
the sordid reality is that email is *NOT* free and never has been free I couldn't agree more with that statement. And as the volume of total email traversing the internet goes up, so does the cost of sending it, when viewed in the light of traffic and hardware needs. Filters save essentially zilch on these costs, as the email has already made most of its journey by the time the filter takes action.
Yet some people either don't acknowledge, or refuse to acknowledge, that filters are solving the wrong problem. so much of it is clearly illegal and yet it is so clearly public I've seen that as well. Most of the spam I get is pushing prescription drugs or obviously pirated software. Of course when we don't know where the criminals are actually located, it becomes very difficult to have any legal action taken against them. And if they really are in Tahiti / Russia / China / Zimbabwe, then good luck with that, as obviously US laws have about zero jurisdiction in any of those places.
As I've said before, spam is a problem because it has an economic incentive for the spammers. The real solution is not to keep changing email acceptance rules through yet another filter rule change, but to remove the economic incentive through real action. If they can't sell their crap, they'll move on. As long as its still easy for them to do, they will keep doing it.
I replied saying that my efforts in filtering have been very effective. It has been effective only in the context of your number of users. And what has it done to prevent the spam from being sent? Nothing. The spam still traversed the internet from the originating mail server (another problem) and was then rejected in some way once it reached your network. And being as the spammers likely don't track whether any amount of their spam reaches any destination, your filters are trivial from their perspective. And making it better for users is "futile"? It is futile in terms of actually trying to proactively stop spam. It does nothing to control spam-driven internet traffic. It does nothing to deter spammers from sending spam.
You don't honestly believe that for some reson filters would cause spammers to send less spam, do you?
All the spam that is filtered out on behalf of my clients is spam that my clients could have bought from. The incentive is diminished by every spam that could have made it to a willing recipient but did not. And how many customers do you have? Honestly, even if you have hundreds of customers, thats only a small drop in the bucket compared to how many people the spammers hit every day. And how do you know that none of your customers have any other email addresses? Are you sure none of them have hotmail/yahoo/gmail addresses that may be seeing spam there?
This makes no sense. Without the filters, they would still be willing suckers. That was in regards to the suckers who the spammers need to work just a little harder to get to. The spammers know those people are out there, and will happily work around common filters to get to them. Hence the filters are compounding the problem because they only cause the spammers to get more creative.
but that doesn't mean that spam filters don't solve problems in a very real way Spam filters do nothing to actually prevent the spam from happening, though, Which means that the spam still has very real costs, even if it doesn't get through. It costs bandwidth, it costs time.
Have you ever maintained a mail server Yes, I have. Have you ever been a LAN admin? Have you ever tracked the bandwidth that a domain consumes just in the process of taking in and rejecting spam? The spammers are costing you money even when you don't see their junk email.
all the spammers in the world find a new technique and implement it together. You don't need all of them. You don't need many of them at all, in fact. If even just one figures it out you need to go back and spend more time revising your rules. At which point they've already cost you money and time.
better for users and worse for spammers The disagreement here is that you're willing to work on only one. I want a solution that does both. A filter really doesn't make it worse for spammers, even if it does make it better for users. Its not like your filters actually have any real effect on the spammers themselves - they don't really care how much email goes through, as long as some of it does. And unless you want to implement your wonderful filters for the entire world, then the spammers will always get something through.
The spam problem has been addressed by reactive "solutions" for years now. We've all seen it just continue to get worse. I want a proactive solution to spam. No filter in the world could ever be proactive, because it can't take the incentive away from the spammers.
That's when I shake my cane at her and tell her I won't be buying anything from her company...
And to get off my lawn, daw-gonnit.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I could care less whether or not the person to whom the domain is registered is willing to speak English or not. I was talking instead about whether or not the registrar of US-based TLD's will actually speak english. For example, I have seen that spammers are enjoying the registrar services of bizcn.com. If you go to their website, there is virtually no English on it. But yet the registration data they make available for the
So no, I don't care what kind of balls the registrars have. Indeed, I would say they have too large of cajones already. I'd like to see some castration done to get them in line to help remove the economic incentive that they make for the spammers.
Except that the mail has already been delivered to your network at that point. So I would say we've already lost. Even if you aren't using any significant CPU time at that point, you're still wasting bandwidth. The spam has already traversed the internet to get to you. Even if you didn't acknowledge that it got to you, it still came in.
So really, we need to ask why it was sent to begin with...
As much as we'd like to say it was because of some evil-doer who we would like to see strung out on 1st street ala the old days of the London Bridge, it is simpler than that.
It was sent to you because of the potential to make money. Spam is still big business for a certain number of people. Obviously we'll never 100% of people who use the internet to stop buying from spam, and even 99.99999% isn't close enough to remove the incentive from the spammers.
The only way to win against spam is to take away the profitability. And all the filtering in the world can never accomplish that.
from the well-kinda-novell-anyway dept
CmdrTaco needs to double check that. At least someone with the qualifications was smart enough to tag the story as "!novell" to try to clear it up.
I would say that indicates that filters are losing the war on spam, because the spammers just find new ways around them. Its not about whats easy. I'm not looking for an easy solution, I'm looking for a solution that will actually work.
And a working solution would have to remove the incentive behind spam. Your filters do nothing to remove the incentive. One could even argue that filters add incentive to spammers, because they know that there are plenty of joe users with machines that have simple geek-squad-installed spam filtering, who just might be willing suckers if the spam can get through.
Hence, filtering does nothing to stop the problem. Its a band-aid for a gushing head wound. Just because you can hide from spam, and turn your back to it for a few weeks until the spammers find a way past your newest algorithm doesn't mean that you're winning at all. Indeed, we're all losing because the spammers are still making enough money to pay for registration and hosting costs. As well as their addresses in Tahiti, Finland, China, and Siberia.
Sadly enough, I know someone who chose his 4 year college based on ping times to his favorite Quake servers...
You'll probably be shocked to hear that he graduated by some sort of formality...
I have said before, and am saying again, we need an economic solution to an economic problem.
The spammers continue to send out spam becuase they make money at it. If we can make it less profitable for them, then they'll stop doing it. However, the spammers have so many partners in crime that we can't easily hinder them until at least one of their cohorts will agree to work on the right side of the law.
The way I see it, we still should be going after the registrars. A good chunk of the spam comes from a small portion of the spammers (and their gangs). We know who these people are, and so do the registrars. But currently, we just play the same game ad naseum:
And the game repeats. And the only party who can easily be contacted about it is the registrar - who will of course deny all wrong doing, or just hide behind the security of whatever communist country they reside in this week.
If registration was instead restricted to actual respectable registrars (at least for common TLDs) then a lot of this could be short-circuited.
Instead, we allow registrars who don't speak English (or at least claim to not speak English when you contact them) to sell
I've seen that firsthand myself. I'm working on my PhD in biochemistry, and I know another student in my department who is months away from his defense. He came here from China, and speaks excellent English. But yet he has not been able to obtain citizenship. This actually has larger problems than just retention, because non-citizens cannot apply for grant money from most federal agencies, which of course makes a career in academia unlikely.
As the previous post said, these are the very people we should want most.
I found that customers fell into several different classifications:
You can't meet all of these criteria with one device. Hell, you can hardly even meet any two of these with one device. And that was a big part of the problem, was that the manufacturers wanted to sell one device - or one line of very similar devices - to every customer.
But yet it still seemed that the manufacturers measured the success of their devices by comparing to PC sales, which was idiotic to say the least. Therefore many of the systems that had solid markets, if they weren't made by 3com/USR (or Palm after I left), either weren't carried in stores long enough to sell, or weren't carried at all. Hell, the Libretto I only learned of through a customer of ours who came in and asked why we were carrying the picturebook but not the Libretto, when very few customers cared about the lousy camera on the Sony.
Basically, my conclusion is that the market has killed itself off. There is room for diversity, but where is it? There isn't any. Basically you buy a palm, or a winCE copy of one, or you don't buy anything reasonably portable at all. What happened to the clamshell units that had tiny keyboards AND fit in your pocket? They're gone, likely to never be seen again. What happened to running PDA's on AA / AAA batteries? After all, some travelers don't always have 4 power adapters with them for everything they use while on the road...
I'm not sure how my comment was redundant. Perhaps if there was a 'smart-ass' tag, I could understand that. But redundant? With what? I was trying to point out that the slashdot introduction for the article was written poorly - namely that someone left a tag hanging open that mucked up the meaning of the intro for me and the 4 other slashdot readers who don't play half-life.
interesting stories like Portal to come out of Valve as they trickle out what they refer internally to as 'The [Half-Life] Bible.'"
Either the title of the game is "Portal to come out of Valve as they trickle out what they refer internally to as 'The [Half-Life] Bible.'", or someone forgot to close a tag. I know I won't be the first to call the local retailer asking about availability on a game with a title that is 19 words long.
Did you consider that perhaps they made their pricing decision in 2001? Obviously I don't sit on the board at Lego, so I can't tell you how often they may decide to adjust their pricing for international markets. Nor do I know how large or small the Australian market is. But perhaps, just perhaps, they may have felt that the 6 year old exchange rate was close enough.
And beyond that, we're not even considering the additional costs of getting it to you. If Lego's are all made in Europe, they need to then get them to you in Australia in some manner, and there aren't any options for doing that which I would expect to be both quick and affordable. And then of course there are tarriffs to pay as well...
Someone else pointed out that US prices are before tax, and many other countries are after tax. Most states charge sales tax in the US on the range of 6-10% - which could of course be up to $50 for this item. If you take that into consideration before accusing the company of gouging, you may see that their prices aren't all that bad.
And if it really irks you that much, you can always try to find an importer of your own to deal with it - pay the American price and then deal with Australian customs once it gets to you. That may or may not be worth the effort, I have no way to tell you that.
Also, I'll point out that its not all milk and honey up here, either. When I was looking for deposit accounts up here, I found your banks are paying about twice the interest (or better) than ours. So while our economy up here is currently geared towards importing and spending, you folks have a decisive upper hand on low-risk investment.
However, we have learned something from them. As Bill Maher said in his show:
Airplane black boxes must now be made out of Keith Richards. The man, who has taken more drugs than Whitney Houston, Rush Limbaugh and Robert Downey, Jr., combined, recently fell out of a tree, and then crashed a jet ski. And yet, somehow, that cigarette never fell out of his mouth. What is this guy still running on? I've got to know. Because I'm beginning to think the future of medicine isn't injecting stem cells, it's injecting heroin.
I don't think I would call that gouging. Most companies that do business in mutliple countries, using multiple currencies, only do conversions every year or less. A good example can be found at your local newsstand - next time you're there, pick up a magazine. Most magazines sold in the US (at least in Northern states) have prices in US and Canadian dollars. But most of them are based on old conversions of $1US = $1.25CA. Some are even worse, based on $1US = $1.50CA.
Ultimately, though, they are probably most concerned about getting their margins right for the US price, since it may well be their largest market. Even when the US economy is rocky, it is still a country with hundreds of millions of consumers, and a pretty significant per capita wealth.
You can have that debate to yourself. We already know the result of the more important debate.
Mohammed Ali is his prime was way better than anti-lock brakes!
Hmmm, I guess the answer really was as obvious as it appeared. I expected I was missing out on something here and the furries were some specific type of trekkie critter.
I'm not sure its advisable to ask for that translation around here - someone's likely to know what it would be!
I don't get it. Who exactly do the "Furries" represent? I am familiar with the Klingons, but if the Furries represent some group in particular, I have no clue who that would be...