This poster makes incorrect assumptions based on total lack of knowledge of the topic.
MoveableType is not a service. It's a piece of software like OpenOffice or Slackware. There is no 'price to pay to give blog space to anyone who wants it.'
The phone was answered by a non-british accented woman. Probably american accent. She said it was not Flamingo Travel but it is a travel agency.
Here's the deal. This is probably being done by an aggregator. The spammer is probably giving out a specific 1-800 number that forwards to a 'reputable' travel agency. Whatever is booked off this phone number is then given a commission to the spammer. It might even be a flat commission on the number of calls, completely ignoring the sales made. So, essentially, it could be like a banner click-thru deal and by us calling, the spammer is making mega-bling.
In any case, if you're going to call this number, be sure to alert the person that you are simply calling to complain about the faxes. This will help the travel people understand that the garbage calls they are receiving are the result of unpleasant and intrusive advertising practices.
When the first slashdot article on him came out, he was selling the suit for $500,000 (US). Since it appears it didn't sell at that price, it seems as if he's throwing it on eBay to see what it will fetch. $5,000 is really not a very high starting bid. Keep in mind the thousands of hours he put into making these suits and he's making less than a buck an hour.
Practical use? There's all kinds of expensive crap on the market with no practical use. Some people call it art.
Ashcroft and the rest of Bush's cronies are big-business friendly. There is absolutely no way Ashcroft would pursue the recording industry to try to wrestle away money that belongs to random artists.
Are they relying on cheap Asian labor to build their fast cars and gigantic bungalows?
In fact, these fatcats are purchasing european-built cars such as Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, TVR, etc. That's a hundred+ grand that leaves the US for good. And the dudes building those bungalows are mexicans who frequently are paid under the table by a subcontractor, so no money is collected by the IRS in the form of income tax. They mail the bulk of their paychecks back home to family in Mexico, which also means little is collected in terms of sales tax. This is why the Bush Administration is trying to legalize so many immigrant laborers. We need them working here, but we also can't afford to lose all that money from govt. coffers. I vehemently oppose Bush being in the White House, but this is an issue that he seems to be coming to grips with even though the rest of his party is against it.
I still just use my Rio500 as my mp3 player and happily it is supported natively under iTunes for Mac. iTunes for Windows doesn't seem to work with it as I think there are special USB needs under the OS or something.
Of course, I'd love an iPod, but so far I'm still happy with my Rio500 with the 64 meg internal storage and 128 meg smart media card. I flashed the roms with something off the net that improved the display and provided support for the 128 meg card.
I wrote the webmaster, however, asking why 'H2 Hummer' is a category. If that fits the definition of exotic, then they should also add a volkswagon section.
Follow the relational database model of data storage... For attachments and messages that are duplicates across many accounts, just store one copy and put pointers to that copy in each person's account. According to that article earlier this week, 30% of all email is spam, so right there, you can save 30% of your disk space by only storing one copy of each spam. And think of all the savings in virus attachments, too!
Garage Band is a pretty good concept. The only weak link is the Real Player requirement for most content (playlists, radio, most artists don't have mp3s online). I say this only because it keeps crashing on my Mac OS X G3 450 box. The player does provide good features for the service such as embedded links to the artist page and the album artwork.
Garage Band's strength is that with all the voting / reviewing it enables quality stuff to get recognized out of the clutter.
There is no reason for Apple to brag about the money they might be making from the iTunes store. If they were to scream in the media, "Holy shit! We're making metric shit-tons of money selling songs via iTunes!" then that would fuel Venture Capital for every joe-blow to start iTunes copy-cats. The market would get diluted. Instead, they act like it's a sucky business model and that the real money is in the hardware. Well, that doesn't scale very well, and VCs know that, so no one is dumping money on the copy cat iPod makers. Only established hardware vendors are making them.
This probably uses existing R & D from voice identification technology they developed for the US govt. For instance, Pablo Escobar was captured after he made a phone call. He didn't call a traced number or from a traced number. His
voice simply popped up on the phone lines. Bam! They identified his voice and captured him. And that was more than 10 years ago. Obviously, this is an example of how this technology has improved.
Your existing car would be grandfathered in the same way that all other vehicles don't have to be re-fitted to match current regulations. If you have a pre-1964 automobile, it doesn't need a catalytic converter. If you have a pre-1945 motorcycle, you don't have to have a headlight. Older cars also don't need those additional brake lights installed top-center-rear.
Essentially, don't sweat this. You can always keep your old car.
My dad asked me the other day why his TiVo can't play his AAC files like it does his mp3s. I thought about it for a few moments, and gave him the technical reason. But then I thought about the big picture reason-- Apple doesn't license AAC to TiVO because keeping it to themselves leaves the door open for them to create a home-media-option like appliance in the future. I think this strategy probably applies to every other opportunity where people want to license AAC...
Haven't noticed anyone mention, but there's no discussion here of Real opening up their own crap codecs for Apple to use in iTunes...
Nightvision goggles? Metal detectors? The theaters certainly aren't footing the bill on this. Perhaps the studios. The theaters claim that the distributors are taking 90% of ticket prices and their margin of profit is pretty thin. Don't think they can afford these crazy things.
I fully agree. Frequently 'ask slashdot' topics are pretty blantantly solved with a
google search.
But in this case, perhaps some community brainstorming could bring fresh ideas to this challenge and we could get some innovation.
For instance, I have an old Quicktake 200 digital camera. That's the very second generation of digital cameras. First one with an LCD. Works fine, but the resolution sucks. If I wanted too, I think I could mount the LCD facing out of the front of my case with the rest of the camera attached. I could create a bunch of images in photoshop that would look like a few meters displaying data (CPU temp, Disk space per disk, fan RPM, bandwidth utilization). Each image is the same, but the values on each meter change a bit between the frames. Store all the pics on a smart media card and load them into the camera. Set it on slideshow or just 'play'.
I could even probably connect wires to the buttons (switches) on the camera to control the slideshow from my computer via some kind of X10-like controller interface.
Take that idea one step further: Figure out how to wire a USB card reader into the contacts where the camera reads from the smart media card. Plug the USB cable into the computer and somehow create a virtual memory card for the camera to read from. Bingo. You can now dynamically generate the images the camera can read in the slideshow mode. Now you've got a real version of the fake display I was describing above.
This is a kind of workaround to interfacing a controller to an LCD screen. Use the existing controller and hijack the data that's being sent to the screen...
As per your definition, I am an idiot. I don't have any experience with PostgreSQL and was unfairly generalizing it in the same pool with MySQL. Thanks to your post, however, I will now re-examine PostgreSQL as a DB solution for my future web app efforts.
Honestly, I got deep into a project with MySQL, and found that it was just too primitive for my needs. I assumed that these same faults plagued PostgreSQL. Thanks for the clarification.
I also agree that MySQL and PostGre are laughable when you're trying to build a critical application with them. Sure, they work good for managing what some 15 year-old thinks about star trek, but they get kind of clunky when you are looking for stuff like cascading deletes, foreign key enforcement, etc. Actually, I don't have experience with PG, just MySQL. So perhaps this doesn't apply. Sure, MySQL beats MS Access, but comparing it to Oracle is ridiculous. It's a tricycle compared to a porsche. And the price is about the same.
Please ask the captains of industry about their secret society memberships. If they deny this affilitation, please inquire about the purpose of the pyramid and eyeball on the dollar bill. Be sure to point out that India has all kinds of odd religious figures with multiple arms and the like.
Shiva is finally trouncing the masons and I'm betting that they are now regretting having kept their society so secret now.
Whenever I have a cup of melted ice (water) or just some water in my house that I'm not going to drink, I feel wierd pouring it down the drain. Instead, I'll walk outdoors and pour it on the lawn. I guess I'm trying to avoid taxing the city water system with purifying water that doesn't need to be cleaned. Should my business card include the word 'engineer'?
2) The Mac Way - drag and drop for 99% of programs.
2) Actually, Mac OS X provides it's own installer app that developers can leverage for their own package installations. It provides the niceties of read-mes, EULA, authentication, etc. Very slick.
Slashdot Mirror
This poster makes incorrect assumptions based on total lack of knowledge of the topic.
MoveableType is not a service. It's a piece of software like OpenOffice or Slackware. There is no 'price to pay to give blog space to anyone who wants it.'
I checked on the guy who posted this.. there's really no history of him posting anything on slashdot prior to this--
iotashan
Seems like a banner click thru scam, but this time it's with a 1-800 number. Brilliant.
Wrecked Exotics is a fun site.
I wrote the webmaster, however, asking why 'H2 Hummer' is a category. If that fits the definition of exotic, then they should also add a volkswagon section.
Your existing car would be grandfathered in the same way that all other vehicles don't have to be re-fitted to match current regulations. If you have a pre-1964 automobile, it doesn't need a catalytic converter. If you have a pre-1945 motorcycle, you don't have to have a headlight. Older cars also don't need those additional brake lights installed top-center-rear.
Essentially, don't sweat this. You can always keep your old car.