Yes getting infected because you just got sent the latest virus that isn't even IN the datafiles yet, and infects your PC simply by having the "preview pane" enabled is being such an incompetant operator, you are SO right. Please excuse my utter incompetance.
When I can get infected simply by RECIEVING an email and not even reading the damned thing or opening an attachment or anything, is the day I quit using Linux too. I don't really think that day is coming.
My wife I believe mostly got infected with spyware by following links to "funny" sites, but the spyware she got was so new there wasn't a remover for it yet when I "battled" it, Mike@spywareinfo hooked me up with a beta cleaner and I got rid of it, then shortly after, got rid of Windows on her computer by giving her a Mac, since then no problems. She's not dumb enough to open attachments or launch programs so hopefully there won't be no "auto infecting" viruses for Mac anytime soon either.
I just hit the "join beta" link and didn't fill out the form, on the page you signup I see:
System Requirement
Windows 2000/2003/XP
Ok so I'm out, last windows I read email on was Win95 or maybe Win98, some bullshit virus or another screwed me over, I ain't "done email" on Windows of any type since. Oddly enough, I haven't had any viruses, spyware, adware, or malware since then either.
So while I applaud efforts to reduce spam, efforts that requre Windows seems silly at best and are efforts I can't join in on. Even my wife no longer reads email on Windows, the last time her Windows PC slowed to a crawl due to spyware instead of spending 3 or 4 hours googling for the latest cleaners and finding out what new and not at all entertaining spyware she had, I said "fuck this' gave her my new and as yet unpacked Mac Mini and she hasn't had any spyware problems since. Ripped her PC apart and installed Linux on it to replace my laptop as my main "work" pc.
Sell that idea to your company's largest competitor! Make a fortune, retire, and give the finger to them all:D
I actually worked with an engineer who had designed and patented a project while working as a consultant for the company we both (now) worked for.
Seems the company didn't have a very well thought out contract with him when he was a consultant and he was LEGALLY able to PATENT the he designed to IMPROVE the project he was paid to work on. It was a total add on that had seperate uses in other applications and he patented the thing, they sued him, he won, so they had to license the patent from him for that thing he designed to improve their machines! They then hired him full time and got better employment and consulting crontracts after that hard earned and EXPENSIVE little lesson.
He laughed all the way to the bank, a hero among men if there ever was one.
I am unfortunate enough to know of 2 people who went to prison for such acts:
#1 - raped his 2 year old son, 5 years in prison #2 - raped his daughter from 11 till she ratted him out at 17, he started touching her around 7, 8 years in prison, will most likely be out in 5 (early next year)
So if you get popped for pirating a movie, rest easy in the knowledge that you could have raped a child instead, and gotten less prison time than "stealing" that movie.
4x250G SATA Motherboard with onboard 4 port sata raid 1G ram AMD 3000+ ATI 9800pro
Put this all together several months ago for around 1100 bucks, nothing out of this world, No redundancy just straight raid-0 and 960 gigs or so of usable space (I'm just storing music and movies if the drives go south oh well).
My other pc that runs my 57" projection TV has 4x120 and 3x80 gig drives in one bigass volume set (yeah boo hiss) and the machine next to it has 4x160 gig on a 3ware ide raid controller to hold even more ripped DVD's. All of these are RMA or pulled harddrives from servers, once I pull a drive I won't use it in a production machine again so it goes towards adding more to my home network! haha
Downloaded this and installed it on the wife's Mac-mini already and finally she can open those old Openoffice and MS Word docs she's got. She's been on me for weeks to get that working for her.
It seems to be a bit slow to load but once it's up it seems to work OK, as long as she can open her old docs and read them all is good!
First off - my wife knows not to open attachments and not to run wierd stuff, she's not a total dumbass but even though, every few months the amount of spyware on her machine would get so bad I'd have to spend several days hunting it all down.
Well last time she said "my computer keeps popping up windows all the time and it's slow again" I said fine, here's a new PC, the Mac Mini I bought and didn't really need so here you go.
Ya know what? It went real well, she's been able to "relearn" most of the stuff she does with little or no help from me, she's figured out most stuff right on her own, something she wasn't typically able to do on Windows. I'm extremely happy with how painless her transition to the world of Mac has been so far.
And now when she gets a link to something she's like "is it ok if I open this link?" I'm like "sure there's not THAT many viruses, etc for a Mac, so you're likely safe".
let's not be too picky here,.ru.br.mx are another few I can't remember ever recieving a non-spam from....info is pretty "low" on the list too but I have gotten at least a few legitimate emails from.info.
It's $142 to file a small claims complaint where I live, if you win it's added to the judgement, if you lose you eat it, but you have to pay the $142 up front. Not quite $20 and even if you DO win, you've only won a judgement, the courts don't COLLECT for you that's your problem. Just what I was told by the county court clerk when I thought about suing a real estate agent who royally screwed me over.
I had a run-in with IYD a while back when a customer tried to transfer a domain to us, he finally gave up and registered a new domain similar to what had and started over.
I emailed icann I emailed IYD I emailed everyone I could find called what I could and nothing happened. Filed icann complaints, the customer filed complaints, and nada, nothing.
IYD is the worst I've yet to encounter, register.com, registerfly, melbourneit are all bad but IYD is the winner hands down for slimy.
1 in 100,000? what part of your ass did you pluck that number out of? There was -maybe- and I mean -maybe- 2000 spam sent out (ok maybe 3000 but much closer to 2), how do "I" know these numbers? I looked at the damn logs (I am root hear me roar).
And there are about 2 dozen different vulnerable formmailers out there, some are perl, some are php, some are addons to forums, some are addons to nuke, some are webmail modules with insecure smtp scripts. No I don't even CLAIM to be able to find them all.
Go piss up someone else's leg.
Within minutes of getting a complaint this problem was solved, end of story, total spam sent under 3000 and barely over 2000. When I find known vulnerable formmailers they're chowned to root and chmoded 600 and a nasty mail sent out, but I don't even begin to have enough ego to think I know them ALL. Plus assholes have a bad habit of renaming them to clever shit like "feedback.cgi" or "form.cgi" or "mailform.cgi" or (jesus it goes on and on, it's not malicious they're just well, renaming it for one reason or another).
Don't even try and insinuate I don't know what "professional" hosts do. I host over 15,000 web sites and I can count on 1 hand the number of blocklists I have servers on, and that number is -1- and that 1 blocklist can bite my ass because I ain't paying them jack shit to remove me, simple as that.
I had a server blocked by some really dumb anti spam site a while back, there was an open formmail on some customer's site, we recieved a complaint, we found it, we deleted it, I think in all we got 2 spamcop complaints and one complaint from a person so obviously there wasn't -that- much spam sent before we were notified and nuked the formmailer.
Time between us recieving the -first- complaint and the script being nuked from the server? Minutes, not even half an hour. It's not like we ignored the problem and allowed it to fester.
Well we ended up on some spam list that (get this) requires you to make a $50 donation to some charity to get off the list! Oh and it gets better, they listed 3 charities, 2 of them didn't work because they wanted NOTHING to do with this spam list after they were dossed, attacked, hounded, and overall just harassed for these bozos listing them on their site. The 3rd charity? Some legal defense fund, via PAYPAL for... the owner of the site!!
Well the -1- server blocking email because of that list I just contacted them and pointed them at this podunk little anti spam site and they quit using them and email went through and all was well.
Months later, 4 or more, we're STILL listed on that damned spam site. I could care less.
Spews and maps are just making it so any serious sysadmin/network/provider can NOT use them for RBL blocking, they're just overzealous.
I use spamcop, ordb, blitzed, and spamhaus quite regularly on a variety of servers, the "false positives" are low, and I rarely hear of someone legitimately not able to send email to anyone I host.
If I can download a DRM laden free tv show I'd probably do it, assuming I wanted to see it of course.
DRM laden episodes of CSI free and ready to download and watch? Sure I'll grab it and forego the torrents/etc. Free downloads of a band I like except what I download is DRM filled? Sure that's cool, I mean I'm not paying MONEY so beggars can't be choosers.
If I pay for a song, a show, a movie, I want to be able to do whatever "I" want to with it, I'm not going to give it away, share it over p2p or none of that crap but I might want to burn a dvd, copy it to another PC, put it on VCR, etc etc, I don't want any hampering on that level if I PAY for it.
I would feel it's perfectly fine to record the radio and put it up for download but when you buy a cd and make a copy it really oughta be just for your own use or at least the use of your "household" in my case, I feel no pains at all when I rip a cd and burn it to an mp3 compilation and put a copy in both my wife and my cars to listen to. It's a matter of quality same as cassette copies, I won't copy the radio or a cassette because the copy sucks and it'd annoy me to no end to listen to it, a cd RIP however heck that's near perfect quality and I guess that's the fundamental issue, the issue of quality.
You forget bad teeth. But a good british accent can be sexy on a woman, not as sexy as a french accent but it'll do.
Good food and good weather? haha cute.
Now on to the topic, TV piracy seems... I dunno almost impossible, ASSUMING it's something I get normally. How can you "pirate" say, Survivor (ugh) it comes on my TV normally, it's not something I couldn't watch otherwise, so what if I decide to watch it on saturday night around 1am via an mpeg? Ok so I didn't record it myself, I COULD have. Is it any more piracy for me to download that episode of south park, or Tivo it?
Sure I suppose if it's something I wouldn't normally get but then another argument comes into play "if I wasn't ever gonna get it no way, have I taken anything away from the provider?" it's not like "hey I was gonna buy this DVD but I downloaded it instead" ok that's theft of a sort, or "hey instead of buying this music cd I got it via kazaa" this is TV shows, they kinda give those away anyway.
Yeah I know, all sortsa lawyers could shoot all sortsa holes in my arguments but really what's being pirated? Either you get the show normally and could easily enough record it yourself or you wouldn't ever get the show at all normally and you're merely adding to the viewership, I can't see how this would be a "bad thing" for the people behind the show "hey not only did we get a nielsen rating of X there were at least another Y thousand viewers via internet downloads, PEOPLE LIKE OUR SHOW, please renew our contracts, k thx".
I dunno just seems like a no lose situation for the studios, it's not like they sell me the TV shows I watch (I wouldn't PAY for most of them UGH TV sucks ass).
I have a 30+ level character I play and a 28+ char, and they're gaining levels slowly. I break out the 60 for instance runs, pvp raids, and to help other lowbies out with instances in my group of friends (call it a guild if you will).
I make no apologies for what I do, At the rate I can level it'll seriously be 3 or 4 months before I can level out and take part in the cool stuff we're always doing, and by then many of my friends will likely , You can bitch and whine all you want, cry me a river.
In game economics is becoming closely tied to out of game economics, I can more easily afford several hundred bucks for a ready made character than I can several hundred hours of my time making one myself, so hey, that's how it goes.
I like to play games, I have a group of friends I've played online games with since the infancy of online MMORPGS (DarkSun Online nearly 10 years ago now) and unlike the olden days, I can no longer play as many hours as I used to. I have a kid, wife, a company to run, etc, so my play time isn't that "much".
So I'm left with staying a "newbie" forever, for example in WoW it takes "roughly" 300+ hours of real play time to get a character "maxxed" out, playing 3 maybe 4 hours a day, I'm looking at 3-4 months to get maxxed out so I can join in the "high level" fun stuff. By then most of my friends will be on their 3rd or 4th maxxed char and hell by then most of them will be quitting for the next game and I'm sitting there going "damnit".
So what do I do? $300 for a maxxed char off Ebay, $300 for enough gold from one of those gold selling services that I can afford to buy enough "good stuff" to be able to join in those high level shenanigans, and I'm set. Obviously if I were working for $8 an hour this would be stupid, but $600 is maybe 2 days income for me, call it 15 hours of work to make that cash, 15 hours of "real world labor" to save myslef 300+ hours of "game time grinding"? I'll pay it. Now I'm able to join in all the reindeer games.
As for the "sweatshops" are these people supposedly being forced to work for these companies? What is these peoples' alternatives? Where would they be working if they weren't doing this? As I understand it there isn't just a glut of "good jobs" in many of these locales so is playing an online game all day for a boss 'that' bad of a job or is it a pretty decent setup for these folks? I think fast food restaurants are HORRIBLE sweat shops and any time I see some teenager being browbeaten by a 20 something manager I just thank the gods I no longer work in fast food (I did during high school and some of my college times).
Just out of curiousity, how does a 500W 5.1 stereo, a 17" lcd, etc, how does this benefit you? Wouldn't a $39 boom box from walmart ALSO play those CDs? Wouldn't a 15" crt also display your computer output?
So is this stuff practical or practical for YOU? People buy $80,000 cars, I don't think that is practical, but they enjoy driving them, showing them off, etc, and to them that is practical, people buy Rolex watches, a status symbol I wear a watch from Wal-Mart it wasn't a cheap one, I paid about $180 for it, but it's no Rolex.
One man's practical is another man's frivolous.
I'm not living near China/etc but I have a feeling no one rides around the cities picking people up at random "ok YOU you're working for US now, get in the van", I suspect these workers can quit these "sweatshops" anytime they want and go find another job, they do THIS job because it's the best job they feel THEY can get and they are probably happy to sit in that "sweatshop" as opposed to working in a Nike factory all day...
I bought my son a vintage NES for his 4th birthday in Oct, complete with gun and Duck Hunt he absolutely LOVES it. Mario Bros and Mario Bros 3 he plays almost as much as the games he plays on his Gamecube, maybe more.
So not all whippersnappers scoff at the old games:)
Unless you're chained up or behind bars, they can only do to you what you ALLOW them to do.
So unless this man is shackled to his death he should DO something about it. This is AMERICA where there's a lawyer on every corner and under every sewer grate, FIND ONE, I bet there is at least one or two labor laws being broken here, call them on it. Find some ex-employeess or current employees to stand with you and start a class action suit. I'm the last person to holler "sue the bastards" but sometimes that's the only thing they'll understand.
Think quitting will wake them up? No way there's a thousand other programmers just itching to take that shitty job who can then begin bitching about the hours themselves.
Sucks to be you eh? Sounds like it's time to move to a registrar who'll let you lock your domains or, well don't, sounds like a personal problem to me.
First off, anyone who has a clue (and granted that's definitely not everyone) has their domains set to "Registrar-lock" already - this means when a transfer request is made it is automatically denied by the registrar right away. This stops all sortsa fun and games, in the past mainly to stop assholes like DROA (Domain Registry of America) and Register.com from "slamming" my (and other's) customers. See these assholes send REALLY OFFICIAL looking "renewal notices" to domains expiring soon by postal mail, with instructions to simply return a check for $25 or fill in CC info and if someone isn't paying attention, or clueful, they just transferred their domain to these bastards without a clue.
So I started years ago setting registrar lock to ON for everything I register.
However one bonus is, maybe this will make a FEW transfers INTO me a little easier. The assholes at itsyourdomain.com pop into mind, they will absolutely deny any transfer no matter how much their customer screams "I WANT TO TRANSFER THIS DOMAIN AWAY FROM YOU GODDAMNIT". Complaints to ICANN, and others go unheeded.
So in short - ICANN SUCKS, this rule doesn't really suck THAT bad but I'm sure there's going to be at least a few horror stories about lost domains next week.
There's plenty of places to shop, and I know I, personally, go OUT OF MY WAY to shop elsewhere.
I hate Best Buy, for many reasons, and I will bend over backwards to buy stuff elsewhere, online, Circuit City, CompUSA, whatever.
So far I ain't spent a dollar in Best Buy in going on 2 years and I still manage to buy all those gadgets and geegaws that I want without a problem.
So.. who needs you Best Buy? Not me.
And I'm not a "demon customer" I go in KNOWING what I want, I hate mail in rebates and don't use them, I only return something if it just frankly. BREAKS or doesn't work at all. And I have as much disposable income as I need and no impulse item I truly want goes unpurchased.
I've spent well over $5K at circuit city, $3K at Compusa, and god I hate to add it up at Ebay in the last couple years (20K++ but I bought 2 cars and a motorcycle on there so that's not nearly just electronic gizmos).
If I never step foot into Best Buy again it'll be too soon.
I feel the same way about Wal Mart but I find myself spending money there regularly for everyday crap, toys, groceries, etc.
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Yes getting infected because you just got sent the latest virus that isn't even IN the datafiles yet, and infects your PC simply by having the "preview pane" enabled is being such an incompetant operator, you are SO right. Please excuse my utter incompetance.
When I can get infected simply by RECIEVING an email and not even reading the damned thing or opening an attachment or anything, is the day I quit using Linux too. I don't really think that day is coming.
My wife I believe mostly got infected with spyware by following links to "funny" sites, but the spyware she got was so new there wasn't a remover for it yet when I "battled" it, Mike@spywareinfo hooked me up with a beta cleaner and I got rid of it, then shortly after, got rid of Windows on her computer by giving her a Mac, since then no problems. She's not dumb enough to open attachments or launch programs so hopefully there won't be no "auto infecting" viruses for Mac anytime soon either.
I just hit the "join beta" link and didn't fill out the form, on the page you signup I see:
System Requirement
Windows 2000/2003/XP
Ok so I'm out, last windows I read email on was Win95 or maybe Win98, some bullshit virus or another screwed me over, I ain't "done email" on Windows of any type since. Oddly enough, I haven't had any viruses, spyware, adware, or malware since then either.
So while I applaud efforts to reduce spam, efforts that requre Windows seems silly at best and are efforts I can't join in on. Even my wife no longer reads email on Windows, the last time her Windows PC slowed to a crawl due to spyware instead of spending 3 or 4 hours googling for the latest cleaners and finding out what new and not at all entertaining spyware she had, I said "fuck this' gave her my new and as yet unpacked Mac Mini and she hasn't had any spyware problems since. Ripped her PC apart and installed Linux on it to replace my laptop as my main "work" pc.
Sell that idea to your company's largest competitor! Make a fortune, retire, and give the finger to them all :D
I actually worked with an engineer who had designed and patented a project while working as a consultant for the company we both (now) worked for.
Seems the company didn't have a very well thought out contract with him when he was a consultant and he was LEGALLY able to PATENT the he designed to IMPROVE the project he was paid to work on. It was a total add on that had seperate uses in other applications and he patented the thing, they sued him, he won, so they had to license the patent from him for that thing he designed to improve their machines! They then hired him full time and got better employment and consulting crontracts after that hard earned and EXPENSIVE little lesson.
He laughed all the way to the bank, a hero among men if there ever was one.
I am unfortunate enough to know of 2 people who went to prison for such acts:
#1 - raped his 2 year old son, 5 years in prison
#2 - raped his daughter from 11 till she ratted him out at 17, he started touching her around 7, 8 years in prison, will most likely be out in 5 (early next year)
So if you get popped for pirating a movie, rest easy in the knowledge that you could have raped a child instead, and gotten less prison time than "stealing" that movie.
4x250G SATA
Motherboard with onboard 4 port sata raid
1G ram
AMD 3000+
ATI 9800pro
Put this all together several months ago for around 1100 bucks, nothing out of this world, No redundancy just straight raid-0 and 960 gigs or so of usable space (I'm just storing music and movies if the drives go south oh well).
My other pc that runs my 57" projection TV has 4x120 and 3x80 gig drives in one bigass volume set (yeah boo hiss) and the machine next to it has 4x160 gig on a 3ware ide raid controller to hold even more ripped DVD's. All of these are RMA or pulled harddrives from servers, once I pull a drive I won't use it in a production machine again so it goes towards adding more to my home network! haha
Downloaded this and installed it on the wife's Mac-mini already and finally she can open those old Openoffice and MS Word docs she's got. She's been on me for weeks to get that working for her.
It seems to be a bit slow to load but once it's up it seems to work OK, as long as she can open her old docs and read them all is good!
Everything else is secondary you take what you can get, as long as you get paid.
First off - my wife knows not to open attachments and not to run wierd stuff, she's not a total dumbass but even though, every few months the amount of spyware on her machine would get so bad I'd have to spend several days hunting it all down.
Well last time she said "my computer keeps popping up windows all the time and it's slow again" I said fine, here's a new PC, the Mac Mini I bought and didn't really need so here you go.
Ya know what? It went real well, she's been able to "relearn" most of the stuff she does with little or no help from me, she's figured out most stuff right on her own, something she wasn't typically able to do on Windows. I'm extremely happy with how painless her transition to the world of Mac has been so far.
And now when she gets a link to something she's like "is it ok if I open this link?" I'm like "sure there's not THAT many viruses, etc for a Mac, so you're likely safe".
let's not be too picky here, .ru .br .mx are another few I can't remember ever recieving a non-spam from... .info is pretty "low" on the list too but I have gotten at least a few legitimate emails from .info.
It's $142 to file a small claims complaint where I live, if you win it's added to the judgement, if you lose you eat it, but you have to pay the $142 up front. Not quite $20 and even if you DO win, you've only won a judgement, the courts don't COLLECT for you that's your problem. Just what I was told by the county court clerk when I thought about suing a real estate agent who royally screwed me over.
I had a run-in with IYD a while back when a customer tried to transfer a domain to us, he finally gave up and registered a new domain similar to what had and started over.
I emailed icann I emailed IYD I emailed everyone I could find called what I could and nothing happened. Filed icann complaints, the customer filed complaints, and nada, nothing.
IYD is the worst I've yet to encounter, register.com, registerfly, melbourneit are all bad but IYD is the winner hands down for slimy.
Hahahaha
1 in 100,000? what part of your ass did you pluck that number out of? There was -maybe- and I mean -maybe- 2000 spam sent out (ok maybe 3000 but much closer to 2), how do "I" know these numbers? I looked at the damn logs (I am root hear me roar).
And there are about 2 dozen different vulnerable formmailers out there, some are perl, some are php, some are addons to forums, some are addons to nuke, some are webmail modules with insecure smtp scripts. No I don't even CLAIM to be able to find them all.
Go piss up someone else's leg.
Within minutes of getting a complaint this problem was solved, end of story, total spam sent under 3000 and barely over 2000. When I find known vulnerable formmailers they're chowned to root and chmoded 600 and a nasty mail sent out, but I don't even begin to have enough ego to think I know them ALL. Plus assholes have a bad habit of renaming them to clever shit like "feedback.cgi" or "form.cgi" or "mailform.cgi" or (jesus it goes on and on, it's not malicious they're just well, renaming it for one reason or another).
Don't even try and insinuate I don't know what "professional" hosts do. I host over 15,000 web sites and I can count on 1 hand the number of blocklists I have servers on, and that number is -1- and that 1 blocklist can bite my ass because I ain't paying them jack shit to remove me, simple as that.
I had a server blocked by some really dumb anti spam site a while back, there was an open formmail on some customer's site, we recieved a complaint, we found it, we deleted it, I think in all we got 2 spamcop complaints and one complaint from a person so obviously there wasn't -that- much spam sent before we were notified and nuked the formmailer.
Time between us recieving the -first- complaint and the script being nuked from the server? Minutes, not even half an hour. It's not like we ignored the problem and allowed it to fester.
Well we ended up on some spam list that (get this) requires you to make a $50 donation to some charity to get off the list! Oh and it gets better, they listed 3 charities, 2 of them didn't work because they wanted NOTHING to do with this spam list after they were dossed, attacked, hounded, and overall just harassed for these bozos listing them on their site. The 3rd charity? Some legal defense fund, via PAYPAL for... the owner of the site!!
Well the -1- server blocking email because of that list I just contacted them and pointed them at this podunk little anti spam site and they quit using them and email went through and all was well.
Months later, 4 or more, we're STILL listed on that damned spam site. I could care less.
Spews and maps are just making it so any serious sysadmin/network/provider can NOT use them for RBL blocking, they're just overzealous.
I use spamcop, ordb, blitzed, and spamhaus quite regularly on a variety of servers, the "false positives" are low, and I rarely hear of someone legitimately not able to send email to anyone I host.
If I can download a DRM laden free tv show I'd probably do it, assuming I wanted to see it of course.
DRM laden episodes of CSI free and ready to download and watch? Sure I'll grab it and forego the torrents/etc. Free downloads of a band I like except what I download is DRM filled? Sure that's cool, I mean I'm not paying MONEY so beggars can't be choosers.
If I pay for a song, a show, a movie, I want to be able to do whatever "I" want to with it, I'm not going to give it away, share it over p2p or none of that crap but I might want to burn a dvd, copy it to another PC, put it on VCR, etc etc, I don't want any hampering on that level if I PAY for it.
DRM filled rentals? maybe, just maybe.
I would feel it's perfectly fine to record the radio and put it up for download but when you buy a cd and make a copy it really oughta be just for your own use or at least the use of your "household" in my case, I feel no pains at all when I rip a cd and burn it to an mp3 compilation and put a copy in both my wife and my cars to listen to. It's a matter of quality same as cassette copies, I won't copy the radio or a cassette because the copy sucks and it'd annoy me to no end to listen to it, a cd RIP however heck that's near perfect quality and I guess that's the fundamental issue, the issue of quality.
You forget bad teeth. But a good british accent can be sexy on a woman, not as sexy as a french accent but it'll do.
Good food and good weather? haha cute.
Now on to the topic, TV piracy seems... I dunno almost impossible, ASSUMING it's something I get normally. How can you "pirate" say, Survivor (ugh) it comes on my TV normally, it's not something I couldn't watch otherwise, so what if I decide to watch it on saturday night around 1am via an mpeg? Ok so I didn't record it myself, I COULD have. Is it any more piracy for me to download that episode of south park, or Tivo it?
Sure I suppose if it's something I wouldn't normally get but then another argument comes into play "if I wasn't ever gonna get it no way, have I taken anything away from the provider?" it's not like "hey I was gonna buy this DVD but I downloaded it instead" ok that's theft of a sort, or "hey instead of buying this music cd I got it via kazaa" this is TV shows, they kinda give those away anyway.
Yeah I know, all sortsa lawyers could shoot all sortsa holes in my arguments but really what's being pirated? Either you get the show normally and could easily enough record it yourself or you wouldn't ever get the show at all normally and you're merely adding to the viewership, I can't see how this would be a "bad thing" for the people behind the show "hey not only did we get a nielsen rating of X there were at least another Y thousand viewers via internet downloads, PEOPLE LIKE OUR SHOW, please renew our contracts, k thx".
I dunno just seems like a no lose situation for the studios, it's not like they sell me the TV shows I watch (I wouldn't PAY for most of them UGH TV sucks ass).
I have a 30+ level character I play and a 28+ char, and they're gaining levels slowly. I break out the 60 for instance runs, pvp raids, and to help other lowbies out with instances in my group of friends (call it a guild if you will).
I make no apologies for what I do, At the rate I can level it'll seriously be 3 or 4 months before I can level out and take part in the cool stuff we're always doing, and by then many of my friends will likely , You can bitch and whine all you want, cry me a river.
In game economics is becoming closely tied to out of game economics, I can more easily afford several hundred bucks for a ready made character than I can several hundred hours of my time making one myself, so hey, that's how it goes.
I like to play games, I have a group of friends I've played online games with since the infancy of online MMORPGS (DarkSun Online nearly 10 years ago now) and unlike the olden days, I can no longer play as many hours as I used to. I have a kid, wife, a company to run, etc, so my play time isn't that "much".
So I'm left with staying a "newbie" forever, for example in WoW it takes "roughly" 300+ hours of real play time to get a character "maxxed" out, playing 3 maybe 4 hours a day, I'm looking at 3-4 months to get maxxed out so I can join in the "high level" fun stuff. By then most of my friends will be on their 3rd or 4th maxxed char and hell by then most of them will be quitting for the next game and I'm sitting there going "damnit".
So what do I do? $300 for a maxxed char off Ebay, $300 for enough gold from one of those gold selling services that I can afford to buy enough "good stuff" to be able to join in those high level shenanigans, and I'm set. Obviously if I were working for $8 an hour this would be stupid, but $600 is maybe 2 days income for me, call it 15 hours of work to make that cash, 15 hours of "real world labor" to save myslef 300+ hours of "game time grinding"? I'll pay it. Now I'm able to join in all the reindeer games.
As for the "sweatshops" are these people supposedly being forced to work for these companies? What is these peoples' alternatives? Where would they be working if they weren't doing this? As I understand it there isn't just a glut of "good jobs" in many of these locales so is playing an online game all day for a boss 'that' bad of a job or is it a pretty decent setup for these folks? I think fast food restaurants are HORRIBLE sweat shops and any time I see some teenager being browbeaten by a 20 something manager I just thank the gods I no longer work in fast food (I did during high school and some of my college times).
Just out of curiousity, how does a 500W 5.1 stereo, a 17" lcd, etc, how does this benefit you? Wouldn't a $39 boom box from walmart ALSO play those CDs? Wouldn't a 15" crt also display your computer output?
So is this stuff practical or practical for YOU? People buy $80,000 cars, I don't think that is practical, but they enjoy driving them, showing them off, etc, and to them that is practical, people buy Rolex watches, a status symbol I wear a watch from Wal-Mart it wasn't a cheap one, I paid about $180 for it, but it's no Rolex.
One man's practical is another man's frivolous.
I'm not living near China/etc but I have a feeling no one rides around the cities picking people up at random "ok YOU you're working for US now, get in the van", I suspect these workers can quit these "sweatshops" anytime they want and go find another job, they do THIS job because it's the best job they feel THEY can get and they are probably happy to sit in that "sweatshop" as opposed to working in a Nike factory all day...
I bought my son a vintage NES for his 4th birthday in Oct, complete with gun and Duck Hunt he absolutely LOVES it. Mario Bros and Mario Bros 3 he plays almost as much as the games he plays on his Gamecube, maybe more.
:)
So not all whippersnappers scoff at the old games
I still hadn't completed upgrading ALL systems to 4.3.9 yet! There goes my weekend.
You said exactly what I was about to say.
Unless you're chained up or behind bars, they can only do to you what you ALLOW them to do.
So unless this man is shackled to his death he should DO something about it. This is AMERICA where there's a lawyer on every corner and under every sewer grate, FIND ONE, I bet there is at least one or two labor laws being broken here, call them on it. Find some ex-employeess or current employees to stand with you and start a class action suit. I'm the last person to holler "sue the bastards" but sometimes that's the only thing they'll understand.
Think quitting will wake them up? No way there's a thousand other programmers just itching to take that shitty job who can then begin bitching about the hours themselves.
Sucks to be you eh? Sounds like it's time to move to a registrar who'll let you lock your domains or, well don't, sounds like a personal problem to me.
First off, anyone who has a clue (and granted that's definitely not everyone) has their domains set to "Registrar-lock" already - this means when a transfer request is made it is automatically denied by the registrar right away. This stops all sortsa fun and games, in the past mainly to stop assholes like DROA (Domain Registry of America) and Register.com from "slamming" my (and other's) customers. See these assholes send REALLY OFFICIAL looking "renewal notices" to domains expiring soon by postal mail, with instructions to simply return a check for $25 or fill in CC info and if someone isn't paying attention, or clueful, they just transferred their domain to these bastards without a clue.
So I started years ago setting registrar lock to ON for everything I register.
However one bonus is, maybe this will make a FEW transfers INTO me a little easier. The assholes at itsyourdomain.com pop into mind, they will absolutely deny any transfer no matter how much their customer screams "I WANT TO TRANSFER THIS DOMAIN AWAY FROM YOU GODDAMNIT". Complaints to ICANN, and others go unheeded.
So in short - ICANN SUCKS, this rule doesn't really suck THAT bad but I'm sure there's going to be at least a few horror stories about lost domains next week.
There's plenty of places to shop, and I know I, personally, go OUT OF MY WAY to shop elsewhere.
I hate Best Buy, for many reasons, and I will bend over backwards to buy stuff elsewhere, online, Circuit City, CompUSA, whatever.
So far I ain't spent a dollar in Best Buy in going on 2 years and I still manage to buy all those gadgets and geegaws that I want without a problem.
So.. who needs you Best Buy? Not me.
And I'm not a "demon customer" I go in KNOWING what I want, I hate mail in rebates and don't use them, I only return something if it just frankly. BREAKS or doesn't work at all. And I have as much disposable income as I need and no impulse item I truly want goes unpurchased.
I've spent well over $5K at circuit city, $3K at Compusa, and god I hate to add it up at Ebay in the last couple years (20K++ but I bought 2 cars and a motorcycle on there so that's not nearly just electronic gizmos).
If I never step foot into Best Buy again it'll be too soon.
I feel the same way about Wal Mart but I find myself spending money there regularly for everyday crap, toys, groceries, etc.