I know for true dat Tony Hawk is real. So is DJ Qbert. I don't know those other people, though.
*Editor's Note: Now that we've successfully converted our writer to a Windows PC, we will be working on getting her to try a Pocket PC. Stay tuned for more developments!
Isn't this a little big-brother-ish as well? If not cultish. It's like they took this perfectly happy party-girl and said, "No you must wear your church clothes on Sunday and kneel." This line is gloating over having crushed her independence.
I am not too sure what the distinction is between a racket and a scam. While I agree there may be some circumstances that would warrant this insurance policy, they only pertain to those people who own their own dwelling. If you're renting, there's no reason you should bear this expense. Does the phone company ever ask their customers if they own or rent? No. They just add the charge onto your bill. Lets do the math on the revenue:
In a city of 1 million, let's assume 10% are renters. That's 100k people. If they all have phone service and are paying for this uneccessary 'service', that's like $400k a month the company is bilking from consumers.
If there are any class-action lawyers out there, please file a suite against the phone companies over this!
Well, I suppose if there is a route for the rats to get in and out of your attic, there must also be a route for the snakes to get out when there is no more food. I don't imagine the smell of a dead snake in your walls is any worse than the smell of a dead rat.
Damn! That sounds rough. Get some snakes if you can and let them go up in your attic. If you put a heat lamp on a timer in there, they'll probably stay and will definitely reduce your packrat population.
Since you're a homeowner, it might make sense in your case to keep the inline plus... In the case of apartment renters, though, it's wildly unnecessary.
At my highschool we had this great physics teacher named
Mr. O'Leary. He did all kinds of active demonstrations. One went terribly bad, though.
He was attempting to demonstrate how a large mass will absorb the energy of a hammer and protect the underlying structure (a hand in this case). So he sets this brick on his own hand on the stage in the auditorium (this was a big lecture which had ALL the different physics sections there) and asked the biggest brown-noser in his class (Mark Marking) who was sitting in the front to come up and smash the brick with this hammer. Mark resists by saying he doesn't want to, but O'Leary urged him to do it. Mark swung the hammer OVERHEAD and came right down on O'Leary's thumb, which was protruding from the side of the brick. His thumb was literally pulverized. He is so hardcore, though, that he went to the bathroom, got some paper towels, wrapped it up, and finished teaching the class before he went to the hospital. For a year he had to keep the thing elevated above his heart to give the tissue a chance to recover. Here's a picture of him nowadays (he's the older guy on the side.) That's the thumb as well. This all happened in the mid-80s, BTW, at a school in Tokyo, Japan.
Inline Plus is an 'insurance policy' the phone company will always try to sell you (monthly fee of $3.95 or so). It's supposed to 'protect' you in case your wiring fails inside your house and needs to be repaired by the phone company. If you are a renter, then there's no risk of you bearing the expense of fixing telephone wiring, so there's NO NEED for inline plus. If you are a home-owner, it's highly unlikely that you'll encounter a (phone) wiring problem you can't fix yourself.
When you sign up for phone service, the salesperson will inevitably automatically add this to the list of services regardless of if they ask you if you want it or not. When I realized what this was about after 10 months of paying for it, I called up customer service and told them to remove it from my account and that I had never authorized it. They refunded me my BACK CHARGES for inLine Plus. It was like $40 or so.
I have heard this argument before, and it makes a lot of sense. Chris Rock even offers it in his HBO special. But I'm not entirely convinced there isn't incentive to find a vaccine. The reason I am suspicious is because there is plenty of competition in providing medicines that 'treat' an ongoing illness. The profit opportunity here is limited by distribution, advertizing, effectiveness, etc compared to competing treatments. But a vaccine... you've immediately got an audience of > 5 billion people. And you'll keep selling that vaccine to new humans until there is no more aids. That will be several generations.
Research for a cure is more prone to your argument. The target market is anyone who gets infected, which is the same market the treatments are soliciting. The profit models are one injection vs. a subscription for the remainder of the patient's life...
There are bigger patent issues than who controls one-click shopping.
Currently 25 million Africans are infected with HIV. If a vaccine is found for AIDS, or even some kind of cure, it is unlikely these people will receive it. Patents held by the developer(s) of such drugs will prevent the mass distribution neccessary to avert the crisis going on in these dirt-poor countries. Sure, the costs of R & D for AIDS medicine are huge. If there wasn't a profit opportunity out there, most of this research wouldn't be performed in the first place. So it's quite a catch-22. Perhaps the World Bank can pay off the pharmaceutical company that develops a cure so the drug can be freely available. Or maybe the cure will only be available to wealthy San Franciscans.
I like to use
streamripper to record internet radio shows to mp3 files. I'll then record these to mp3 cdrws that I listen to in my cdplayer while I ride my bike to work. BTW- a bike is another good open source product, but it doesn't run on windows as well as it does the street.
Glad to hear from several people with first-hand knowledge of Ecuador.
Would you say people in Ecuador need food shipments?
That's the misconception I was trying to dispell with the reference to the banana export. Of course the banana industry isn't providing trickle-down economic support to all the people of Ecuador. But it's hardly a country we need to send food to.
The person currently occupying the Oval Office does not use email. He made this decision after taking office because he didn't want to have all his correspondence be viewable by the public. Basically, he didn't want anything written that could be used against him at anytime. So everything is spoken communication for him. I tried to find a link to some article that documents this policy, but jeez.. there's a lot of articles out there about Bush.
Ecuador does not need food. It is the largest banana exporter in the world. It is a hugely agricultural nation which is not suffering from droughts, etc. Ecuador does need infrastructure. These computers are part of that needed infrastructure. They need to leap beyond agrarian subsistence farming to get the country out of its economic hole.
What can accelerate this change? Education for sure. Books, schools, etc. How about a computer and internet connectivity? We've got a lot laying around here gathering dust. Probably more so than textbooks written in spanish.
I've visited Ecuador several times. Once I was helping some women at a library set up a VCR and TV that was recently donated by some wealthy Ecuadorians (I was a friend of the donors). The women working in the library were nicely dressed and educated pretty well from what I could tell with my limited spanish. They were the Ecuador equivalent to minimum-wage office workers in America.
When it came time to put the batteries in the remote control, I realized the value I was bringing to the VCR-TV-setup project. These women had never held a remote control. They needed some batteries (2 X AA), which they also had no experience with. I gave them a dead AA from my walkman so they could take it to the local shop and make sure they were buying the right size (with money provided by the donors). When they returned with the batteries, I had to explain the pictures inside the battery compartment so they'd understand how to install the batteries in the future.
I guess I am relating this anecdote so people can better understand the technological chasm that seperates people around the world. Sure, booklearning is a key part of a third-world country's development. At the same time, these free computers are going to help as well.
Another opportunity here would be to set your free access point up and have it routing through someone else's free access point. Run your ads, etc, and you don't have to pay for any of the bandwidth! On top of that, you can log all the proxy stuff and capture all kinds of fun e-mail, etc.!
As someone who 'merely supports someone elses software' I would ask you ('a professional software developer') to consider the overhead involved in running Outlook in this 'compatibility layer'. For starters, Outlook on the Mac is probably not natively coded by its vendor. It was probably ported over via some kludge of an emulator. So right off the bat, it's not going to run optimized on PPC hardware, regardless of the OS. So then you run that emulator inside another emulator (Classic Mode) in Mac OS X on hardware that you haven't specified (RAM & CPU). Mac OS X.1 isn't especially speedy on my G3-era equipment. If that's what you're trying to run these multiple layers of emulation on, with possibly less RAM than is ideal, it makes perfect sense to me that this 'Outlook' application would run dog slow. If it's a mail client, it's probably indexing everything in its own databases, so lookups and insertions, and indexing is going to exacerbate this scenario...
I empathize with you and your situation @ your department. On the plus side, I bet you are one of the few in your department who hasn't been responsible for sending out email viruses...
I provide technical support for a piece of software. It is my company's responsibility to ensure that this software performs suitably on the platforms we specify in the release notes. It is not the responsibility of the OS vendor to ensure compatibility of our software with their OS. If you are unsatisfied with the performance of this application called 'Outlook,' then you need to contact the vendor and ask them to improve it.
The article correctly notes that this model of powerbook does not have external ADB. It does have localtalk, which does support network protocols such as TCP/IP, so remote administrative tools such as timbuktu or VNC would work here. It would be dog-slow, but should work fine.
If you guys are overweight, then lose weight. Unless you guys have some gimmick and being fat is part of the schtick, it's going to be pretty hard if you guys are not easy on the eyes.
They're probably playing this game like DuPont did with the '
bulletproof' Kevlar vests. First they came out with these awesome vests made of their patented material. All the cops got them. Then a while later, special Teflon-coated bullets hit the streets that could penetrate the vests. Know who makes Teflon? DuPont. But somehow Ice-T got in trouble for just singing a song called CopKiller while DuPont profits off the actual technology of killing cops.
Why have an event... indeed! What is the goal here? Awareness? Big deal! In the grand scheme of things, are unsecure wireless networks going to mean anything real to humankind? Is this Wardriving 'event' going to draw attention to a subject that will make someone think twice about something that might save the lives of themselves and/or others?
To put this in perspective, consider that for years cellphones were 100% open to eavesdropping. In one case this vulnerability was exploited to expose a scandalous affair Prince Charles was having. Did people take notice and say, "Damn. I better get some encryption going on!" No.
Even if every wireless AP owner knew people might be accessing their networks surrepititiously, would they really care enough to do something about it? Probably not.
This would be a great excuse for people who have to build Proof of Concepts for client demos. You could bring your non-functioning demo to the pitch meeting and just show them a white screen. Run through the sales pitch and if the customer complains, you could explain that because the product is so proprietary, your boss requires you use this screen to enforce confidentiality.
You know, it's really a weird thing to see all these utterly doomed efforts launched like this and not wonder, "Who really thought this would work?" Seriously. The engineers who worked on the CueCat, the 'secure' proprietary music format Napster utilized in one of their rebirths, and other technological boondoggles
had to have known the project they were working on was doomed. I guess people in those situations are just 'doing it for a paycheck' and aren't caught up in stock options or any long-term aspirations with the company. If I were running my own project, I'd sure as hell listen to my engineers when they poo-poo the product concept, etc.
I think a lot of us in the community had our suspicions about Netscape's preferences. Something about the smile on that big lizard...
Sure explains all those sites not supporting Netscape... damn homophobes! Perhaps all Netscape users can now sue those sites for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation...
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Well, I suppose if there is a route for the rats to get in and out of your attic, there must also be a route for the snakes to get out when there is no more food. I don't imagine the smell of a dead snake in your walls is any worse than the smell of a dead rat.
good luck,
seth
Damn! That sounds rough. Get some snakes if you can and let them go up in your attic. If you put a heat lamp on a timer in there, they'll probably stay and will definitely reduce your packrat population.
Since you're a homeowner, it might make sense in your case to keep the inline plus... In the case of apartment renters, though, it's wildly unnecessary.
Good luck with the packrat situation!
There are bigger patent issues than who controls one-click shopping. Seth
Seth
Seth
Seth