I think using this, someone should develop a server farm of cheap-o Linux boxes coloated somewhere in... Newark - NJ seems to always get the sleaze, so this shouldn't be any different. Then on each of those machines, they fire up this "call someone via a linux box" technology and then they use that "read aloud this text in some funky voice" code. They just dial through a list of home numbers and spout off whatever text they are given "dear so and so, would can I interest you in a magic carpet that will do dishes and give you amazing oral sex?" They give the person the option to press the number 7 to speak with a real person to order said product, or the person just hangs up all pissed off.
This way, it is the same as regular telemarketing, but you don't need as many operators to make the call - a $300 machine can make multiple calls at the same time and do thousands of them without tiring - over multiple time zones. You only need to keep a staff to monitor the outcome of successful calls, therefore there are lower costs and higher profit margins!
Spam is the e-mail crap that we don't want... it is slimy and gross and nobody likes it... I will call my idea "Oprah" - as in: *slams down phone* "Bastards! I hate that damn Oprah!!"
A relatively bodybuilder died because he was on a fuckload of drugs (largely it was the diuretics that got him - bodybuilders use those to shed the last bit of water, largely from under their skin to get that paper thin covering look and all the veins). He was on a plane and for some reason denied himself water (post competition) and his blood then clotted with the sitting for the prolonged time (states -> germany). Although to be fair, I think what actually killed him was kidney and liver failure in the end. Ahh drugs.
Pro and olympic cyclists (as well as bodybuilders) use various substances to increase their red blood cell count (more red blood cells means more oxygen in the blood to be used - very useful in endurance racing - and bobybuilders use if for blood volume so they get those huge veins everywhere among other reasons). EPO was used for a long time but has recently been dropped due to finally having a good test for it in the drug tests (although technically we all have it in our system since it is a normal thing - just at different levels). There is now a new one out that isn't detectable - go figure.
Also the steroid "A-Bombs" - anadrol - that too increases red cell count and is frequently given to cancer and aids patients - it has the added benefit of huge weight gain (muscle and water) and prevents muscle wasting.
When on these drugs, one has to do just as they say in this article and get up and walk around at regular intervals so as to prevent the blood from clotting (since it is at a higher density, there is more of a chance of it clotting) - there are many stories of the olympic cyclist coaches waking up their athletes every 1-3 hours to have them move about so as to prevent the clotting.
Also - there are heart conditions (my dad has it, as does arnold schwarzenegger (sp?) where the aortic value has one too few flaps and thereby throws off the normal flow of the blood, causing more turbulance, which then causes clotting - which can then move about the body doing all kinds of things that are bad - worst being a stroke and/or heart attack).
As for the sitting issue - I wonder if various chairs are better than others... please say the Aeron - then I can demand it of all of my employers and claim they are threatening my health if they won't give it to me.
Re:is there anything that a markov matrix can't do
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 1
a great source for raw data is the Gutenberg (sp?) project (always makes me think of he Police Academy series).
I used that when I originally got into using the MMs for breaking the Poe Challenge back in '99 (I wasn't the first one, there were at least 3 that did it before me). That was when I discovered that all of Poe's works and most of his known letters and poems are all online in digital form... makes it easy to get all of his stuff.
When I made the radiohead song generator (or I should say "THE" generator - I have no clue if it is the only one - but the one I wrote at least), it tends to say the same things a lot since there is a pretty small amount of data with which to build the MM.
That is why newsgroups and discussion boards are so much fun. I would train it on the religious newsgroups and math newsgroups and then have it post randomly to either of them. Also had a few bots that would post on a fitness discussion board.
is there anything that a markov matrix can't do?
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
That article talks of Baker using statistical probability towards speech recognition. That immediately makes me thing of the markov matrix/chain. The two ways I would have looked at speech without having read anything on it would be FFT and neural nets, and/or markov matricies (likely also with fft).
When I first learned to use them in speech generation (either written or spoken) and also general analysis that became my favorite tool to abuse (my hammer making everything look like a nail?). I immediately thought of how I could use them in image recognition, game ai, and stock analysis... But mostly I used them to post to newsgroups and web discussion boards and then laughed at people responding to them as if they were regular users and usually fighting with them. I wrote a Poe generator (would write stories/poems based on his matrix) and also a radiohead song generator.
Now my current hammer(s) are neural nets and genetic algorithms - but the markov matrix is stuff fun as all hell.
It never says straight out in the article that Baker uses those - but the general concept that is discussed seems to point at them. (and yeah - I know the article was about losing code - but that's boring - what is cool is the code discussed)
for $1999 you could build a pretty solid beowulf cluster out of Athlon XP 2000s (with half a gig of ram).
it would "only" have 5 to 7 nodes depending on your hardware choices - but that would still be fuckloads better than that single mac... well - depending on what you wanted to do. a beowulf cluster is pretty worthless for running Illustrator.
Up until this point I had been spending a large amount of my time writing dynamic html code that usually had links in it for various employers.
Now that this is patent infringment, my employers are far less likely to want to deal with it and instead we will just put up static text - which is way easier.
I hope I still get paid the same... or hell, a raise.
There is also "The Code Book" by Simon Singh which obviously covers largely the exact same thing since there is a fixed amount of history for them to discuss. Both are good - but the Kahn book is much larger.
Singh offered a contest with prizes that lasted a few years and many of the relatively big names in crypto (the ones that aren't at the NSA or some company where they have to stay quiet about what they do) worked on it and broke all the various levels.
From what I have heard from people that know much on it, and from what I've read - I thought the general point of RSA was *relative* ease and speed - but the general method was always going to be "unsafe" - it is just a matter of how long it is "safe" for.
The longer the key, the longer the data stays safe for - but as computers increase in speed and decrease in cost, it will become increasingly easier to break longer keys, and therefore reducing the time that something stays "safe".
there are things that you only don't want seen or known for a few minutes, there are things you don't want seen or known for hours... days - months - those are all judgement calls. But eventually you have things that you always want safe... and it seems that the general concensus (sp?) for those things is not to use RSA.
a year to crack a 1024 key is still pretty damn good - it just depends what you are trying to keep people out of. as long as it is data that is only useful for a few months - then this news isn't horrific just yet.
I can recall a guy posting here on slashdot about his thesis that he wrote. it was about some sort of animal population and how the trends change due to different factors and then he expanded that on to the p2p network and proved how there was a way to bring those down that was the same as weakening the gene pool of a species...
whatever the exact thing was - the jist of it was that in order to break p2p and relatively quickly, one needed to missname files and put out bad quality stuff - it would then get reproduced and add too much noise to the system for it to be useful.
I don't recall his name, but I know it got a front page listing when the story was up... in the past year.
ignored at least 750,000 requests by consumers to be taken off their lists.
I'm sure they didn't ignore them - they use those responses to determine that they now have a confirmed live e-mail address which is worth more than a bunch of e-mail addresses that nobody checks.
so I'm sure they don't just ignore them - they likely instead do just the opposite and have much interest in those 750,000 responses and gave them a little extra attention... like logging them in their database as "live" or something like that.
All I have to say about this is 1) I wish I had thought of it all in 1995 - could have made a bundle and 2) SpamAssassin rules!
On an interesting side note - Bermuda used to steal its cable signal off of a US satellite feed. Or rather the one company in Bermuda that was in charge of local cable was doing this.
So they got their signal for free, and then could charge their customers for it.
But... oops - they got caught. They had been doing it for a long time and someone on the board was smart enough to put aside pretty much all of the money they made from that for the concept of later having to get their asses sued... which is what is going on now.
they aren't allowed a US feed anymore (or are seeing that they aren't going to get any sort of deal now), so now they are buying a south american signal. So the end result is that when you are in Bermuda - many commercials are either in spanish, or just have no audio whatsoever because of where they get the feed from.
so there is no such thing as "Bermudian" listings - they pull it from elsewhere... hopefully it is an elsewhere that I can get listings for. It used to be somewhere up near Buffalo and Rochester NY b/c I recall seeing their news in Bermuda on TV (I used to livein Rochester NY and found it funny to see the "news" in Bermuda showing what used to be local news for me in Roch).
I will look into that - I agree with the screen scrapings - and I'm obviously not against paying for the service since I have TiVo now - I was just too lazy to look into it at the time and needed a fast solution (my fiancee's schedule was getting hetic and in order to save my sanity - I had to find a way to record Friends and the like for her, but with as much automation as possible ). But now that I have TiVo and the ability to pause TV and more importatnly fast forward (not just commericals, but the slow parts of shows) is fantastic. (I'm not much of a sports person or the instant-replay feature would probably get more use than it does now... which is largely on Victoria Secret ads)
Thanks for the info - if I had moderation points I'd hit the hell out of you with 'em.
I've seen the software to do it yourself and also machines that also do it (but aren't the TiVo service).
TiVo calls up a number every night and gets the listing information, is there a way to get that for the free programs and/or other machines?
I know that TV Guide has a web page with the listings - do they have an XML stream that you can grab and parse - or someone else?
If so, I'm not exactly a power user of TiVo and that would be a nice thing to have - but I don't want it as just a VCR sort of thing where I have to manually tell it "record XYZ at 4pm every thursday" - I am spoiled by the listings intelligence that TiVo has.
If there is something out there like that, esp avail over the net, that would be a lifesaver when I move to Bermuda since they don't have TiVo there and I would love to have that or something like that there.
I suppose if that method works for you, then rock out with your cock out.
but for those of us that own urls and/or companies that are web facing (in that everyone out there needs to see it in order to bring in money - not just a page that your parents and your best friend visit once a month) - you need to have an email (or in many cases - many emails) that is public. (or in my case you also have a bunch of urls that you thought were amusing) those emails get hit by bots and then you are added to lists - not to mention that you are added to lists once you have registered a domain name. (obviously it helps to filter out the X@domainname.com where X is not one of the valid emails for that address - many hosted companies will simply let anything through that is at that url, and spam takes advatage of that)
like someone else on here said - while your method works for you, to then wonder why it is a problem for others is naive.
In the end - I use spamassassin and it f'in rules.
I went through over 500 spam a day down to about 3 or so and I figured out that those last 3 are due to the fact that they are bypassing the filter (I have a bunch of different urls and the server that it is all hosted on also has its own name - so mail sent to that username at that host doesn't get sent through any filters and the way that the filters are setup there - pair.com - I can't trap that particular servername).
I have been very impressed with SA and am writing scripts to track the stats even better (I love seeing what it has pulled out everyday). So far I have had zero false positives out of about 1-2megs of mail being filtered everyday for nearly a month now.
SA has multiple different ways of searching the mail - any one of them can be easily bypassed by any given e-mail - but all of them together are really damn good at getting rid of spam. I'm very impressed with it and how well it learns (although straight "out of the box" - or perhaps I should say "straight out of the tar.gz" it brought me down from 500+ spam to 5-10 a day and then I tweaked how my accounts were filtering into SA and that fixed the rest.
my aunt is a patent law attorney (and her father was a partner at one of the best patent law firms in the country) and I can recall her talking about BASF one day.
She said that their ads are amusing to her because they "make it better" by paying a lot of money to keep track of new patents that are made by smaller people (not big companies), then steal them and use them to generate money for themselves and other companies that employ them. They then just absorb the lawsuits and tie them up in the courts until the person or small company fighting them runs out of money.
but that is a lot harder to describe in a catchy way in an ad.
I installed SA and went from around 500 spam e-mails a day down to 3 or so now daily - and those are likely going to get nailed once the monthly learning script is run to teach it how to better filter.
I have v2.50 that I got around Jan 7th, and there have been many changes in the changelog since then, so I will probably "upgrade" at the beginning of Feb and see if that helps more as well.
I find it hard to believe that it is the culprit for the transmission.
the transmission control is on one of the stalks near the steering wheel and the person is likely fucking up and hitting that while meaning to hit something else.
not that that is a genius in ergonomics there - BMWs have retarded ergonomics IMO - but I'm biased to Saabs.
I have read about 50 different things saying that the iDrive has random issues, and there are many for sure - but they are all related to random gadgets and interior fanciness - but it doesn't control the transmission. If the guy is having transmission issues - it is either due to fumbling with the stalk near the steering wheel, or there is some other large issue beyond the iDrive OS.
well... less of your bedroom (since I haven't seen it in days - why won't you return my calls?) - but more of my office desk and laundry basket at home.
if one more person tells me that a cluttered desk means a cluttered mind, I'm gonna kick their teeth in and then piss myself. like last thursday.
I want a phone that can detect if it is in a movie theater with the film running, and instead of playing any sound whatsoever, it just detonates a charge of C4 small enough so that it only horribly disfigures the trying to use it.
that way you can see the mangled people about you and go "ahhh, you're one of those people" and spit on them.
I don't have a sauna Saab, but I do have a 9-3se that I'm turning in soon (coming off lease) - probably next week. Were I staying in the country, I would certainly get another one, but in Bermuda they don't have Saabs, only tiny little cars with small engines (even the new Mini is too big there... well, the engine).
I would post this over at saabnet.com, but I have a feeling they have already seen it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think using this, someone should develop a server farm of cheap-o Linux boxes coloated somewhere in... Newark - NJ seems to always get the sleaze, so this shouldn't be any different.
Then on each of those machines, they fire up this "call someone via a linux box" technology and then they use that "read aloud this text in some funky voice" code.
They just dial through a list of home numbers and spout off whatever text they are given "dear so and so, would can I interest you in a magic carpet that will do dishes and give you amazing oral sex?"
They give the person the option to press the number 7 to speak with a real person to order said product, or the person just hangs up all pissed off.
This way, it is the same as regular telemarketing, but you don't need as many operators to make the call - a $300 machine can make multiple calls at the same time and do thousands of them without tiring - over multiple time zones.
You only need to keep a staff to monitor the outcome of successful calls, therefore there are lower costs and higher profit margins!
Spam is the e-mail crap that we don't want... it is slimy and gross and nobody likes it... I will call my idea "Oprah" - as in:
*slams down phone*
"Bastards! I hate that damn Oprah!!"
you saw it here first. I am a marketing god.
A relatively bodybuilder died because he was on a fuckload of drugs (largely it was the diuretics that got him - bodybuilders use those to shed the last bit of water, largely from under their skin to get that paper thin covering look and all the veins). He was on a plane and for some reason denied himself water (post competition) and his blood then clotted with the sitting for the prolonged time (states -> germany). Although to be fair, I think what actually killed him was kidney and liver failure in the end. Ahh drugs.
Pro and olympic cyclists (as well as bodybuilders) use various substances to increase their red blood cell count (more red blood cells means more oxygen in the blood to be used - very useful in endurance racing - and bobybuilders use if for blood volume so they get those huge veins everywhere among other reasons).
EPO was used for a long time but has recently been dropped due to finally having a good test for it in the drug tests (although technically we all have it in our system since it is a normal thing - just at different levels). There is now a new one out that isn't detectable - go figure.
Also the steroid "A-Bombs" - anadrol - that too increases red cell count and is frequently given to cancer and aids patients - it has the added benefit of huge weight gain (muscle and water) and prevents muscle wasting.
When on these drugs, one has to do just as they say in this article and get up and walk around at regular intervals so as to prevent the blood from clotting (since it is at a higher density, there is more of a chance of it clotting) - there are many stories of the olympic cyclist coaches waking up their athletes every 1-3 hours to have them move about so as to prevent the clotting.
Also - there are heart conditions (my dad has it, as does arnold schwarzenegger (sp?) where the aortic value has one too few flaps and thereby throws off the normal flow of the blood, causing more turbulance, which then causes clotting - which can then move about the body doing all kinds of things that are bad - worst being a stroke and/or heart attack).
As for the sitting issue - I wonder if various chairs are better than others... please say the Aeron - then I can demand it of all of my employers and claim they are threatening my health if they won't give it to me.
a great source for raw data is the Gutenberg (sp?) project (always makes me think of he Police Academy series).
I used that when I originally got into using the MMs for breaking the Poe Challenge back in '99 (I wasn't the first one, there were at least 3 that did it before me).
That was when I discovered that all of Poe's works and most of his known letters and poems are all online in digital form... makes it easy to get all of his stuff.
When I made the radiohead song generator (or I should say "THE" generator - I have no clue if it is the only one - but the one I wrote at least), it tends to say the same things a lot since there is a pretty small amount of data with which to build the MM.
That is why newsgroups and discussion boards are so much fun.
I would train it on the religious newsgroups and math newsgroups and then have it post randomly to either of them.
Also had a few bots that would post on a fitness discussion board.
That article talks of Baker using statistical probability towards speech recognition.
That immediately makes me thing of the markov matrix/chain.
The two ways I would have looked at speech without having read anything on it would be FFT and neural nets, and/or markov matricies (likely also with fft).
When I first learned to use them in speech generation (either written or spoken) and also general analysis that became my favorite tool to abuse (my hammer making everything look like a nail?).
I immediately thought of how I could use them in image recognition, game ai, and stock analysis...
But mostly I used them to post to newsgroups and web discussion boards and then laughed at people responding to them as if they were regular users and usually fighting with them.
I wrote a Poe generator (would write stories/poems based on his matrix) and also a radiohead song generator.
Now my current hammer(s) are neural nets and genetic algorithms - but the markov matrix is stuff fun as all hell.
It never says straight out in the article that Baker uses those - but the general concept that is discussed seems to point at them.
(and yeah - I know the article was about losing code - but that's boring - what is cool is the code discussed)
for $1999 you could build a pretty solid beowulf cluster out of Athlon XP 2000s (with half a gig of ram).
it would "only" have 5 to 7 nodes depending on your hardware choices - but that would still be fuckloads better than that single mac... well - depending on what you wanted to do.
a beowulf cluster is pretty worthless for running Illustrator.
Up until this point I had been spending a large amount of my time writing dynamic html code that usually had links in it for various employers.
Now that this is patent infringment, my employers are far less likely to want to deal with it and instead we will just put up static text - which is way easier.
I hope I still get paid the same... or hell, a raise.
also, I'd like a nap.
There is also "The Code Book" by Simon Singh which obviously covers largely the exact same thing since there is a fixed amount of history for them to discuss.
Both are good - but the Kahn book is much larger.
Singh offered a contest with prizes that lasted a few years and many of the relatively big names in crypto (the ones that aren't at the NSA or some company where they have to stay quiet about what they do) worked on it and broke all the various levels.
From what I have heard from people that know much on it, and from what I've read - I thought the general point of RSA was *relative* ease and speed - but the general method was always going to be "unsafe" - it is just a matter of how long it is "safe" for.
The longer the key, the longer the data stays safe for - but as computers increase in speed and decrease in cost, it will become increasingly easier to break longer keys, and therefore reducing the time that something stays "safe".
there are things that you only don't want seen or known for a few minutes, there are things you don't want seen or known for hours... days - months - those are all judgement calls.
But eventually you have things that you always want safe... and it seems that the general concensus (sp?) for those things is not to use RSA.
a year to crack a 1024 key is still pretty damn good - it just depends what you are trying to keep people out of. as long as it is data that is only useful for a few months - then this news isn't horrific just yet.
I can recall a guy posting here on slashdot about his thesis that he wrote. it was about some sort of animal population and how the trends change due to different factors and then he expanded that on to the p2p network and proved how there was a way to bring those down that was the same as weakening the gene pool of a species...
whatever the exact thing was - the jist of it was that in order to break p2p and relatively quickly, one needed to missname files and put out bad quality stuff - it would then get reproduced and add too much noise to the system for it to be useful.
I don't recall his name, but I know it got a front page listing when the story was up... in the past year.
ignored at least 750,000 requests by consumers to be taken off their lists.
I'm sure they didn't ignore them - they use those responses to determine that they now have a confirmed live e-mail address which is worth more than a bunch of e-mail addresses that nobody checks.
so I'm sure they don't just ignore them - they likely instead do just the opposite and have much interest in those 750,000 responses and gave them a little extra attention... like logging them in their database as "live" or something like that.
All I have to say about this is 1) I wish I had thought of it all in 1995 - could have made a bundle and 2) SpamAssassin rules!
On an interesting side note - Bermuda used to steal its cable signal off of a US satellite feed.
Or rather the one company in Bermuda that was in charge of local cable was doing this.
So they got their signal for free, and then could charge their customers for it.
But... oops - they got caught. They had been doing it for a long time and someone on the board was smart enough to put aside pretty much all of the money they made from that for the concept of later having to get their asses sued... which is what is going on now.
they aren't allowed a US feed anymore (or are seeing that they aren't going to get any sort of deal now), so now they are buying a south american signal.
So the end result is that when you are in Bermuda - many commercials are either in spanish, or just have no audio whatsoever because of where they get the feed from.
so there is no such thing as "Bermudian" listings - they pull it from elsewhere... hopefully it is an elsewhere that I can get listings for.
It used to be somewhere up near Buffalo and Rochester NY b/c I recall seeing their news in Bermuda on TV (I used to livein Rochester NY and found it funny to see the "news" in Bermuda showing what used to be local news for me in Roch).
I'm off to Bermuda by summertime - otherwise I'd have to endure living in a country going the way of Next and ugh... apple...
excellent!
I will look into that - I agree with the screen scrapings - and I'm obviously not against paying for the service since I have TiVo now - I was just too lazy to look into it at the time and needed a fast solution (my fiancee's schedule was getting hetic and in order to save my sanity - I had to find a way to record Friends and the like for her, but with as much automation as possible ).
But now that I have TiVo and the ability to pause TV and more importatnly fast forward (not just commericals, but the slow parts of shows) is fantastic. (I'm not much of a sports person or the instant-replay feature would probably get more use than it does now... which is largely on Victoria Secret ads)
Thanks for the info - if I had moderation points I'd hit the hell out of you with 'em.
I have a TiVo right now and it is great.
I've seen the software to do it yourself and also machines that also do it (but aren't the TiVo service).
TiVo calls up a number every night and gets the listing information, is there a way to get that for the free programs and/or other machines?
I know that TV Guide has a web page with the listings - do they have an XML stream that you can grab and parse - or someone else?
If so, I'm not exactly a power user of TiVo and that would be a nice thing to have - but I don't want it as just a VCR sort of thing where I have to manually tell it "record XYZ at 4pm every thursday" - I am spoiled by the listings intelligence that TiVo has.
If there is something out there like that, esp avail over the net, that would be a lifesaver when I move to Bermuda since they don't have TiVo there and I would love to have that or something like that there.
lol
I suppose if that method works for you, then rock out with your cock out.
but for those of us that own urls and/or companies that are web facing (in that everyone out there needs to see it in order to bring in money - not just a page that your parents and your best friend visit once a month) - you need to have an email (or in many cases - many emails) that is public.
(or in my case you also have a bunch of urls that you thought were amusing)
those emails get hit by bots and then you are added to lists - not to mention that you are added to lists once you have registered a domain name.
(obviously it helps to filter out the X@domainname.com where X is not one of the valid emails for that address - many hosted companies will simply let anything through that is at that url, and spam takes advatage of that)
like someone else on here said - while your method works for you, to then wonder why it is a problem for others is naive.
In the end - I use spamassassin and it f'in rules.
I went through over 500 spam a day down to about 3 or so and I figured out that those last 3 are due to the fact that they are bypassing the filter (I have a bunch of different urls and the server that it is all hosted on also has its own name - so mail sent to that username at that host doesn't get sent through any filters and the way that the filters are setup there - pair.com - I can't trap that particular servername).
I have been very impressed with SA and am writing scripts to track the stats even better (I love seeing what it has pulled out everyday).
So far I have had zero false positives out of about 1-2megs of mail being filtered everyday for nearly a month now.
SA has multiple different ways of searching the mail - any one of them can be easily bypassed by any given e-mail - but all of them together are really damn good at getting rid of spam.
I'm very impressed with it and how well it learns (although straight "out of the box" - or perhaps I should say "straight out of the tar.gz" it brought me down from 500+ spam to 5-10 a day and then I tweaked how my accounts were filtering into SA and that fixed the rest.
John F. X. Sundman
Neal Stephenson
William Gibson
Although any of the Mary-Kate and Ashley series are really killer. They always get into the craziest predicaments
my aunt is a patent law attorney (and her father was a partner at one of the best patent law firms in the country) and I can recall her talking about BASF one day.
She said that their ads are amusing to her because they "make it better" by paying a lot of money to keep track of new patents that are made by smaller people (not big companies), then steal them and use them to generate money for themselves and other companies that employ them.
They then just absorb the lawsuits and tie them up in the courts until the person or small company fighting them runs out of money.
but that is a lot harder to describe in a catchy way in an ad.
that is just what I thought.
I installed SA and went from around 500 spam e-mails a day down to 3 or so now daily - and those are likely going to get nailed once the monthly learning script is run to teach it how to better filter.
I have v2.50 that I got around Jan 7th, and there have been many changes in the changelog since then, so I will probably "upgrade" at the beginning of Feb and see if that helps more as well.
I find it hard to believe that it is the culprit for the transmission.
the transmission control is on one of the stalks near the steering wheel and the person is likely fucking up and hitting that while meaning to hit something else.
not that that is a genius in ergonomics there - BMWs have retarded ergonomics IMO - but I'm biased to Saabs.
I have read about 50 different things saying that the iDrive has random issues, and there are many for sure - but they are all related to random gadgets and interior fanciness - but it doesn't control the transmission.
If the guy is having transmission issues - it is either due to fumbling with the stalk near the steering wheel, or there is some other large issue beyond the iDrive OS.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
well... less of your bedroom (since I haven't seen it in days - why won't you return my calls?) - but more of my office desk and laundry basket at home.
if one more person tells me that a cluttered desk means a cluttered mind, I'm gonna kick their teeth in and then piss myself.
like last thursday.
you sound like my mom.
and by that I mean really hot.
hold me.
I want a phone that can detect if it is in a movie theater with the film running, and instead of playing any sound whatsoever, it just detonates a charge of C4 small enough so that it only horribly disfigures the trying to use it.
that way you can see the mangled people about you and go "ahhh, you're one of those people" and spit on them.
I do that now - but it is largely guesswork.
I agree with you - Garth Brooks is an amazing writer.
I think the best actor is Martin Lawrence in The Great Escape.
( I think you meant Frederick P. Brooks - but perhaps you were in jest and I'm retarded...)
I don't have a sauna Saab, but I do have a 9-3se that I'm turning in soon (coming off lease) - probably next week.
Were I staying in the country, I would certainly get another one, but in Bermuda they don't have Saabs, only tiny little cars with small engines (even the new Mini is too big there... well, the engine).
I would post this over at saabnet.com, but I have a feeling they have already seen it.