Pamela Jones has posted an article on Groklaw written by Theodore C. McCullough Esq that does an in-depth analysis of this case based upon many of the amicus curiae briefs. I've not read it in detail yet, but it looks highly interesting.
Further info from a spammer board posting indicates that Al is still free and *NOT* in custody. My source remains anonymous until I can further confirm it.
Take this whole thing with a grain of salt. There has been no reputable source that has provided this information; it's simply a rumor. Steve Linford has posted on news.admin.net-abuse.email that he knows nothing about Ralsky being taken into custody, and other reliable sources in the antispam forces known to me have no further information to corroborate this story.
Still, it's good news if it turns out to be true. I guess if we don't hear anything by Tuesday or Wednesday, given enough time for the rumored 72 hour seal on Ralsky's indictment to expire, we'll know whether this is bullshit or not.
Broadcasters, your captive audience is escaping. We no longer will sit back and be bombarded by obnoxious ads that insult our intelligence. Live advertising won't do the job. I know I'll simply ignore live ads like I do most advertising already. The mute button still performs its said task, removing most of the annoyance factor during ads, and I can always change the channel and right back again to avoid ads.
Forget ads on TV. Come up with a better way to get the sponsors' messages out to the public. Ads are everywhere now, and people are just becoming more resistant to them.
Another reason for me to love Sarah McLachlan and her Canadian compatriots even more. It takes backbone to stand up to the RIAA powers that be, and I'm glad these artists are making it known that they will not stand for the RIAA to pimp them, and that they do not agree with the RIAA's assault on people who simply enjoy music and want to share it among their friends. I used to buy a lot of music, usually spurred on by what I've found online and enjoyed, and since the RIAA started suing people I've just quit. I won't reward the RIAA, and I live close enough to Canada that I can head to Windsor, Ontario and pick up what I need from my favorite Canadian artists.
I've noticed that since starting to play WoW last year around June that over time the performance issues and network performance have just gone in the toilet. Game patches result in difficulties too numerous to enumerate here. Login queue times have skyrocketed over the last four months, and I keep sending in complaints about how $150 a year should get me better performance than this. I'd love to see their setup and critique it.
Oh, and as far as watching PBS, yes, I watch *a lot* of PBS. Love the music shows. Hate the fact that they claim to be "public-supported" and "commercial-free," and the first 5 minutes of any program slot is filled with a list of corporate sponsors that *LOOK JUST LIKE ADVERTISING*.
PBS is not commercial-free. It's just cleverly disguised ads stuck before the shows.
It's already happening. Ever watch G4TV? I sometimes will tune in the ST:TNG reruns there in the evenings when there is nothing else on, and in the middle of the show, during some particular plot point, suddenly they stick in a banner for the latest show they're looking to get more eyeballs on, usually with some noise or some idiot screaming "Banzai!" Another fine example of marketing gone wrong.
Apparently it *didn't* work as I will go out of my way to avoid those two advertiser's products as a result of their idiotic advertising.
Marketers should think about making their ads a bit more appealing if they really want to catch the eyeballs. Examples: Ads during Superbowl. If they were all that funny and entertaining, I'd not bitch.
Trust me, I don't bother watching the usual pablum that the major US broadcast networks (for example, UPN, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc) push. Usually it's my ST reruns, movies on A&E and major cable networks, educational stuff on Discovery, and Ren & Stimpy and Beavis & Butthead on any channel they might be shown.
Yeah, the content leaves much to be desired, and it's usually on for noise as I'm furiously typing away at medical transcription, which is hard to do and pay attention to much else while doing.
Fuck you. The commercials are the stupidest part of my television-watching experience. Everytime a commercial break happens, I feel my intelligence is insulted. The idiots ensure that the commercials are as annoying, as loud, as irritating as possible in the chance that I might pay attention and buy whatever it is they are pushing, kinda similar to when you visit some neighborhoods in Detroit, and the pimps and pushers start trying to hawk their wares to whoever will listen.
Best example: Matthew Lesko, the screaming asshole who hawks the book full of gubbermint programs to help you go to college, get a job, get money to pay your bills, etc. This idiot runs around in a coat covered in $-signs, looks like Waldo of "Where's Waldo" fame, and SCREAMS ABOUT HOW MUCH HE'S GOING TO HELP ME FIND MONEY FROM THE GOVERNMENT TO GET A CIRCUMCISION OR BOFF MY WIFE NEXT WEEK OR USE CAT FECES AS AN ALTERNATIVE FUEL SOURCE.
Second best example: Recently, Burger King started a commercial campaign to promote a new chicken sandwich. To do so, the commercial starts this slow music with lyrics that go like this:
Big.... buckin' chicken... You are big... and you are chicken... Big... Buckin' chicken...
The commercial features some clown in a chicken suit with a saddle on its back and another idiot riding in the saddle, probably a midget. I work from home, usually leaving the television on, tuned to Spike TV, since there's like a 5 hour marathon of ST:DS9 and ST:TNG reruns, which seem like heaven when compared with the rest of the afternoon fare. Spike ran this commercial at every break during that 5 hour marathon every weekday for the entire months of January through March. On my wife's days off, it was a race to see who could grab the remote the fastest to at least mute the idiocy that was that commercial. Since then, I've vowed never to eat at a Burger King again.
So, now they want to extort money from me to have control over an appliance I've paid upwards of $400 to $1000 US for? Fuck you, you assholes. I'll toss the bleedin' thing in the garbage and start pirating even *more* movies than I do from USENET. It's getting so that I really don't need the TV any more.
I'd look at it more as a failure of the application. If he's saying the process failed, I'm betting it was the failure of a javascript or php application, one that when you submit data, you get some garbage error code back saying to notify the administrator about what's broken. I'd be pissed off, too, if I found myself in that situation, though I'd be asking the manager if there was an external url that the application could be completed from, so I could go home and try it from there.
I don't think there's any actual discrimination going on, but the guy could have tried to approach the manner from a different angle. Another option might have been finding a different store to see if it was a problem local to the first store.
Ah, hell, I know, too much like work, but when you solve these kinds of problems for a living, it becomes second nature.
Pseudoreligious is a misnomer. I am an agnostic member of a 12-step fellowship. My belief can be characterized as "there is some force in the universe that I don't entirely understand that creates particles, planets, biology, stars, etc.", not religious at all. In my 10+ years of clean time in this particular fellowship, I have shared my belief with others freely and I have never once had anyone even remotely suggest it was incorrect. If anyone did, I would simply tell them to go fuck themselves. As a result I conclude that 12-step fellowships lack dogma which is an essential ingredient of any religion or pseudo-religiion.
Been there, got the t-shirt, though you could say I've relapsed or "recovered from recovery."
Just to add a point, even qualifying the idea of a "higher power" as "some unknown force" is a bit off. The way I came to understand it is to find a higher power, something, someone... It could be a tree, a flower, a bird, your tennis shoe, a rock, that purple-pinkish thing hanging on your Mom's bedroom wall, just find something to believe in that is greater than yourself that you can then depend upon to get you through the rough times of kicking your addiction.
Hell, believe in "Bob" for all I care, just believe in *something*.
The only domains that I've seen Joker as a registrar for are spammy websites and DNS hosts, it serves them right. Joker isn't known as the world's most reputable domain registrar.
Mars has a history of 'swallowing' probes, orbiters, and landers sent to the Red Planet.
Read, "Everytime we send one of these things to Mars, we fuck up the orbital calculations, and the bugger is either lost or crashes." Sure, blame Mars, you smarmy bastards.
This coming from the world's leading operating software maker, whose main product is so full of security holes, it's gotta new virus to exploit those holes on an hourly basis. Yeah, that's the kind of reliability and results *I* want.
Actually, it's over a weekend that I can up my rested bonus til the next level if I don't play. Unfortunately, they don't call the game "Warcrack" for nothing.
The only thing people are paying for is Microsoft's laziness to do a proper code audit to clean up their crap OS. That's the lazy component to this whole thing. I find it irritating that they would sell an OS that's insecure, and then charge even more to properly secure it. What a racket!!
Sell a shoddy, insecure operating system prone to virus infection and security compromise, then make your customers pay even more monoey properly secure it.
"Hey Vinnie... put a cap in his guy to shut him up... He knows too much."
I think what they're doing is commendable, and we all have to start somewhere. Nettwerk is home to many great artists, and Nettwerk has been very generous with their works, people and bands like my favorites, Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies, Dido, Chantal Kreviazuk, and many more. I've gotten lots of free Sarah McLachlan stuff over the 15 years I've been a fan, so my loyalty toward her and Nettwerk is pretty well cemented in stone. They've always been an independent label who have not exactly toed the RIAA party line.
It's not my machines that get infected either. I know the steps I need to take to keep them safe, primarily putting them behind a firewall device or Linux box with iptables, to keep them off the public internet, thus I have never had a problem with my own personal equipment. However, I have worked in the past as a field service tech. The bulk of my service calls were concerned with residential users who did not know this one primary safety skill, and who thought that they were invulnerable because they managed to at least keep up with patches. Meanwhile, they're visiting porn sites and unsavory music-sharing or warez sites using Internet Exploder and wondering why their PCs are constantly locking up, slow, or impossible to do anything with.
I think I'm entitled to be critical of the mess that Microsoft calls Windows, which is based on one concept, backwards compatability, which hobbles it from being what I would consider a hardened, secure system. Until Microsoft puts time and personnel behind a thorough code audit or a complete rebuild from scratch, they will continue to suffer from security-related problems, and people and businesses will still bear the brunt of the expense related to correcting these security problems on their own computer infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
Pamela Jones has posted an article on Groklaw written by Theodore C. McCullough Esq that does an in-depth analysis of this case based upon many of the amicus curiae briefs. I've not read it in detail yet, but it looks highly interesting.
Further info from a spammer board posting indicates that Al is still free and *NOT* in custody. My source remains anonymous until I can further confirm it.
Take this whole thing with a grain of salt. There has been no reputable source that has provided this information; it's simply a rumor. Steve Linford has posted on news.admin.net-abuse.email that he knows nothing about Ralsky being taken into custody, and other reliable sources in the antispam forces known to me have no further information to corroborate this story.
Still, it's good news if it turns out to be true. I guess if we don't hear anything by Tuesday or Wednesday, given enough time for the rumored 72 hour seal on Ralsky's indictment to expire, we'll know whether this is bullshit or not.
Broadcasters, your captive audience is escaping. We no longer will sit back and be bombarded by obnoxious ads that insult our intelligence. Live advertising won't do the job. I know I'll simply ignore live ads like I do most advertising already. The mute button still performs its said task, removing most of the annoyance factor during ads, and I can always change the channel and right back again to avoid ads.
Forget ads on TV. Come up with a better way to get the sponsors' messages out to the public. Ads are everywhere now, and people are just becoming more resistant to them.
Another reason for me to love Sarah McLachlan and her Canadian compatriots even more. It takes backbone to stand up to the RIAA powers that be, and I'm glad these artists are making it known that they will not stand for the RIAA to pimp them, and that they do not agree with the RIAA's assault on people who simply enjoy music and want to share it among their friends. I used to buy a lot of music, usually spurred on by what I've found online and enjoyed, and since the RIAA started suing people I've just quit. I won't reward the RIAA, and I live close enough to Canada that I can head to Windsor, Ontario and pick up what I need from my favorite Canadian artists.
I've noticed that since starting to play WoW last year around June that over time the performance issues and network performance have just gone in the toilet. Game patches result in difficulties too numerous to enumerate here. Login queue times have skyrocketed over the last four months, and I keep sending in complaints about how $150 a year should get me better performance than this. I'd love to see their setup and critique it.
This website rated: FUCK YOU.
Oh, and as far as watching PBS, yes, I watch *a lot* of PBS. Love the music shows. Hate the fact that they claim to be "public-supported" and "commercial-free," and the first 5 minutes of any program slot is filled with a list of corporate sponsors that *LOOK JUST LIKE ADVERTISING*.
PBS is not commercial-free. It's just cleverly disguised ads stuck before the shows.
It's already happening. Ever watch G4TV? I sometimes will tune in the ST:TNG reruns there in the evenings when there is nothing else on, and in the middle of the show, during some particular plot point, suddenly they stick in a banner for the latest show they're looking to get more eyeballs on, usually with some noise or some idiot screaming "Banzai!" Another fine example of marketing gone wrong.
Watch SpikeTV. The commercials are the dumbest shit I've ever seen.
Apparently it *didn't* work as I will go out of my way to avoid those two advertiser's products as a result of their idiotic advertising.
Marketers should think about making their ads a bit more appealing if they really want to catch the eyeballs. Examples: Ads during Superbowl. If they were all that funny and entertaining, I'd not bitch.
Trust me, I don't bother watching the usual pablum that the major US broadcast networks (for example, UPN, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc) push. Usually it's my ST reruns, movies on A&E and major cable networks, educational stuff on Discovery, and Ren & Stimpy and Beavis & Butthead on any channel they might be shown.
Yeah, the content leaves much to be desired, and it's usually on for noise as I'm furiously typing away at medical transcription, which is hard to do and pay attention to much else while doing.
Fuck you. The commercials are the stupidest part of my television-watching experience. Everytime a commercial break happens, I feel my intelligence is insulted. The idiots ensure that the commercials are as annoying, as loud, as irritating as possible in the chance that I might pay attention and buy whatever it is they are pushing, kinda similar to when you visit some neighborhoods in Detroit, and the pimps and pushers start trying to hawk their wares to whoever will listen.
Best example: Matthew Lesko, the screaming asshole who hawks the book full of gubbermint programs to help you go to college, get a job, get money to pay your bills, etc. This idiot runs around in a coat covered in $-signs, looks like Waldo of "Where's Waldo" fame, and SCREAMS ABOUT HOW MUCH HE'S GOING TO HELP ME FIND MONEY FROM THE GOVERNMENT TO GET A CIRCUMCISION OR BOFF MY WIFE NEXT WEEK OR USE CAT FECES AS AN ALTERNATIVE FUEL SOURCE.
Second best example: Recently, Burger King started a commercial campaign to promote a new chicken sandwich. To do so, the commercial starts this slow music with lyrics that go like this:
Big.... buckin' chicken...
You are big... and you are chicken...
Big... Buckin' chicken...
The commercial features some clown in a chicken suit with a saddle on its back and another idiot riding in the saddle, probably a midget. I work from home, usually leaving the television on, tuned to Spike TV, since there's like a 5 hour marathon of ST:DS9 and ST:TNG reruns, which seem like heaven when compared with the rest of the afternoon fare. Spike ran this commercial at every break during that 5 hour marathon every weekday for the entire months of January through March. On my wife's days off, it was a race to see who could grab the remote the fastest to at least mute the idiocy that was that commercial. Since then, I've vowed never to eat at a Burger King again.
So, now they want to extort money from me to have control over an appliance I've paid upwards of $400 to $1000 US for? Fuck you, you assholes. I'll toss the bleedin' thing in the garbage and start pirating even *more* movies than I do from USENET. It's getting so that I really don't need the TV any more.
I'd look at it more as a failure of the application. If he's saying the process failed, I'm betting it was the failure of a javascript or php application, one that when you submit data, you get some garbage error code back saying to notify the administrator about what's broken. I'd be pissed off, too, if I found myself in that situation, though I'd be asking the manager if there was an external url that the application could be completed from, so I could go home and try it from there.
I don't think there's any actual discrimination going on, but the guy could have tried to approach the manner from a different angle. Another option might have been finding a different store to see if it was a problem local to the first store.
Ah, hell, I know, too much like work, but when you solve these kinds of problems for a living, it becomes second nature.
Been there, got the t-shirt, though you could say I've relapsed or "recovered from recovery."
Just to add a point, even qualifying the idea of a "higher power" as "some unknown force" is a bit off. The way I came to understand it is to find a higher power, something, someone... It could be a tree, a flower, a bird, your tennis shoe, a rock, that purple-pinkish thing hanging on your Mom's bedroom wall, just find something to believe in that is greater than yourself that you can then depend upon to get you through the rough times of kicking your addiction.
Hell, believe in "Bob" for all I care, just believe in *something*.
The only domains that I've seen Joker as a registrar for are spammy websites and DNS hosts, it serves them right. Joker isn't known as the world's most reputable domain registrar.
Move along, folks, nothing to see here.
Read, "Everytime we send one of these things to Mars, we fuck up the orbital calculations, and the bugger is either lost or crashes." Sure, blame Mars, you smarmy bastards.
This coming from the world's leading operating software maker, whose main product is so full of security holes, it's gotta new virus to exploit those holes on an hourly basis. Yeah, that's the kind of reliability and results *I* want.
No one would use it if there wasn't some kind of shiny, sparkly prize involved. Why would they when there's Google?
Fuck Skype. Fuck Intel. Neither of these companies needs my business.
Actually, it's over a weekend that I can up my rested bonus til the next level if I don't play. Unfortunately, they don't call the game "Warcrack" for nothing.
The only thing people are paying for is Microsoft's laziness to do a proper code audit to clean up their crap OS. That's the lazy component to this whole thing. I find it irritating that they would sell an OS that's insecure, and then charge even more to properly secure it. What a racket!!
Sell a shoddy, insecure operating system prone to virus infection and security compromise, then make your customers pay even more monoey properly secure it.
"Hey Vinnie... put a cap in his guy to shut him up... He knows too much."
I think what they're doing is commendable, and we all have to start somewhere. Nettwerk is home to many great artists, and Nettwerk has been very generous with their works, people and bands like my favorites, Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies, Dido, Chantal Kreviazuk, and many more. I've gotten lots of free Sarah McLachlan stuff over the 15 years I've been a fan, so my loyalty toward her and Nettwerk is pretty well cemented in stone. They've always been an independent label who have not exactly toed the RIAA party line.
It's not my machines that get infected either. I know the steps I need to take to keep them safe, primarily putting them behind a firewall device or Linux box with iptables, to keep them off the public internet, thus I have never had a problem with my own personal equipment. However, I have worked in the past as a field service tech. The bulk of my service calls were concerned with residential users who did not know this one primary safety skill, and who thought that they were invulnerable because they managed to at least keep up with patches. Meanwhile, they're visiting porn sites and unsavory music-sharing or warez sites using Internet Exploder and wondering why their PCs are constantly locking up, slow, or impossible to do anything with.
I think I'm entitled to be critical of the mess that Microsoft calls Windows, which is based on one concept, backwards compatability, which hobbles it from being what I would consider a hardened, secure system. Until Microsoft puts time and personnel behind a thorough code audit or a complete rebuild from scratch, they will continue to suffer from security-related problems, and people and businesses will still bear the brunt of the expense related to correcting these security problems on their own computer infrastructure.