Exactly. We can't block China where I work (an ISP), because we have customers who are businesses, and there's a lot of economic activity between the US and China. We once had to make an exception for the SBL because someone was on a business trip to China and his only net access was via a spam-infested network that had gotten itself listed on Spamhaus.
I wouldn't consider blocking mail based on geography alone unless I could get input from everyone the policy would affect. You can do that as a home user, and you can do that as a business, but IMO it's not an option for an ISP.
There's opinion stated as opinion, there's opinion stated as fact, and then there's bald-faced lies.
"X is a terrible company, don't do business with them" is opinion. "It's widely known that X is a terrible company" is opinion stated as fact. "X is a terrible company because it does Y, don't do business with them" is a mix of opinion and fact, and hinges on whether "X does Y" is true or false.
Some of these are protected speech, in the sense that it is perfectly legal to say them.
All of them are likely to piss off X if they think you're influential enough to hurt their sales.
X is, of course, free to react to your statement as long as they do so in a legal manner. They might kick you out of their store if you do walk in there again, pointing to their "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" sign. They might turn around and badmouth you. "Oh, he's just some guy on the internet posting from his mother's basement, what does he know?" They might threaten you with a lawsuit in order to get you to retract or at least remove the comments, though in some states filing the suit could be illegal unless they can prove you've actually libeled them (look up SLAPP, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation)
I'm one of the lucky few. I don't remember why I tried it, but my jaw dropped and I had exactly the same reaction you did.
(I was also kind of annoyed, because I'd been planning to post a rant somewhere about how much easier it was to unmount a USB drive under Linux/GNOME than under Windows -- and once I discovered the secret maneuver, it turned out to be the same number of clicks for each. A promising "What do you mean, 'Windows is easier?'" rant, wiped out before it could even get started.)
Well, it'll be a series of massive enginering projects: cleanup, design buildings and infrastructure to withstand another such storm, and implement (i.e. build) the design.
The Dutch have the advantage of being on the northwest coast of a continent in the northern hemisphere, where hurricanes move from southeast to northwest. While hurricanes do sometimes turn northward (remember the one last year that ended up near Iceland?), the Netherlands generally don't have to deal with storms of this ferocity.
Now's a good time. Opera's fixed all the clutter (which actually scared me off back in the 4.0 days as well, though I went to Mozilla instead of IE). I've got Opera and Firefox running with the same toolbars open, and they take up the same amount of space.
There's a dialog box that lets you choose either in the installer or the first time you run Opera, but I think if you upgrade from a version that only had graphical ads, it sticks with that setting until you go into the preferences.
Same here -- I have no idea how long it took me to discover that while I suffered through the right-click-and-go-through-a-window clunkiness. The problem is that we've become accustomed to system tray icons being things you right-click on instead of things you just click on.
With other browsers, each site could have its own window if I liked, and there weren't all those unusable screen areas like you got with Opera. Also, on my multi-desktop linux machine, I can have mozilla and/or firefox windows on all the desktops; Opera would only allow one window on one desktop. That's a good way to rule your app out among people who work with multiple desktops.
That's basically the experience I had too, though I used Opera as my main browser during the post-Netscape 4, pre-stable Mozilla days because it was the best non-IE browser available at the time. (I was really bitter at the underhanded tactics MS used to ensure victory, or I might have settled on IE - IE4 and NS4 were roughly comparable, but IE5 was considerably better than NS4.)
The problems have all been fixed over the course of versions 6 through 8, though. The extra UI can be hidden more easily than before, and you can have multiple Opera windows, each with its own set of tabs. With the same items visible in both browsers (toolbar, tabs, bookmark bar, and status bar), a registered (i.e. no-adbar) Opera takes up almost exactly the same amount of space with its UI that Firefox does. (Opera's actually a couple of pixels smaller than Firefox, though at modern screen sizes it hardly matters). Not surprisingly, I now use Opera a lot more than I used to!
Most of the theaters in my area put "Please turn off your cell phones" in with the logos and stuff they run between the commercials and the film, right in there with "No Smoking" and "Please be quiet." I remember counting something like three different "TURN OFF YOUR PHONE" messages in just one showing.
People who yak on their phones during the movie don't even have the excuse of ignorance.
Then there are the commercials -- almost public service announcements, really -- that some cell phone company has been making (Cingular, I think), that start out with some dramatic scene (I can think of one submarine drama and one wire-fu duel) that gets interruted by a ringing cell phone, at which point the actors stop what they're doing and freak out. "What's that?" "It's coming from the audience!"
Long ago, they were in fact shown at the end of the film. But I can't imagine anyone today sitting through the credits to see them, most people make a bolt for the doors at the first sign the movie may be over.
Ah, this makes sense when combined with the fact that the credits used to be shown at the beginning, and they only included the most visible names. (You'd never see a credit for the third-unit assistant grip's hairdresser.) The movie ended, the words "The End" popped onscreen, and that was it -- that would have been the perfect time to tack on a trailer.
I don't mind the previews. Usually they target them by genre and there's a chance I might learn about an upcoming film I might like. (Yes, there's a lot of hedging in there.)
It's the @#%$! commercials that I can't stand! I already paid admission to get in to the theater, I don't need to sit here while you try to talk me into buying a new car/soda/deodorant/whatever, and I don't need to watch TV ads thinly disguised as entertainment "news" ("The Twenty," I'm talking about you!)
Second, "Faithful" doesn't need to be in the literal sense either. A film can be completely faithful to its source and still take large license.
Another example: the stage and film versions of Cabaret. The characters and situation were the same: a doomed affair between two expatriates (one America, one British) set against a Berlin cabaret on the eve of World War II -- but the decision to make all the songs be cabaret acts (with the exception of "Tomorrow Belongs to me") changed the plot almost completely. And yet both the stage version and the movie are very good.
Heh. I finally got around to seeing League of Extraordinary Gentlemen a few nights ago. Once I accepted that the only thing it had in common with the book was the title and the cast list, it was -- as you way -- fun as a mindless flick. Nothing I'd want to watch again, but at least not a total waste of an evening.
Though I suspect watching it under the influence of beer helped considerably.
Contrary? Not exactly. If you save power on the chip, you can afford a little more for the drive(s), though it does seem a bit too much like the "These are 'lite' cookies so I can eat twice as many" strategy.
Or all the classes I had in college where they explained that since hard drives were getting bigger and processors were getting faster, there was no point in trying to optimize your code. (Seriously!)
Nah, #1-4 aren't problems. You can make a good sequel or adaptation, there are occasionally good remakes, and special effects aren't a problem (unless you mean relying entirely on effects).
#5 is the real issue. They're too busy over-engineering the story to water down anything that might lose audience, insert elements that the focus group things will pick up more people in X demographic. If Gone With the Wind were remade today, they'd add car chases (with horse and buggy), there would be bedroom scenes with Scarlett and each of her husbands, Rhett would have kick-ass fight scenes, Prissy would turn out to be a girl commando in the Northern army (and fully capable of delivering a baby), and the movie would be all about how the South deserved to lose.
Funny, just last week everyone was going off about how horrible it was that Microsoft was destroying RSS by renaming it as "Web Feeds," but now suddenly RSS has "won."
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. We can't block China where I work (an ISP), because we have customers who are businesses, and there's a lot of economic activity between the US and China. We once had to make an exception for the SBL because someone was on a business trip to China and his only net access was via a spam-infested network that had gotten itself listed on Spamhaus.
I wouldn't consider blocking mail based on geography alone unless I could get input from everyone the policy would affect. You can do that as a home user, and you can do that as a business, but IMO it's not an option for an ISP.
Actually, that's 80% of North America's and Europe's spam. It doesn't provide any stats on how much of China's spam originates in the US.
It's also a list of the people creating the spam, not the location of the machines that are sending it.
And note that North America includes the US, so a lot of that spam is by Americans, for Americans. Just relayed through China, Korea and Brazil.
There's opinion stated as opinion, there's opinion stated as fact, and then there's bald-faced lies.
"X is a terrible company, don't do business with them" is opinion.
"It's widely known that X is a terrible company" is opinion stated as fact.
"X is a terrible company because it does Y, don't do business with them" is a mix of opinion and fact, and hinges on whether "X does Y" is true or false.
Some of these are protected speech, in the sense that it is perfectly legal to say them.
All of them are likely to piss off X if they think you're influential enough to hurt their sales.
X is, of course, free to react to your statement as long as they do so in a legal manner. They might kick you out of their store if you do walk in there again, pointing to their "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" sign. They might turn around and badmouth you. "Oh, he's just some guy on the internet posting from his mother's basement, what does he know?" They might threaten you with a lawsuit in order to get you to retract or at least remove the comments, though in some states filing the suit could be illegal unless they can prove you've actually libeled them (look up SLAPP, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation)
I'm one of the lucky few. I don't remember why I tried it, but my jaw dropped and I had exactly the same reaction you did.
(I was also kind of annoyed, because I'd been planning to post a rant somewhere about how much easier it was to unmount a USB drive under Linux/GNOME than under Windows -- and once I discovered the secret maneuver, it turned out to be the same number of clicks for each. A promising "What do you mean, 'Windows is easier?'" rant, wiped out before it could even get started.)
Well, it'll be a series of massive enginering projects: cleanup, design buildings and infrastructure to withstand another such storm, and implement (i.e. build) the design.
That techie enough for ya?
The Dutch have the advantage of being on the northwest coast of a continent in the northern hemisphere, where hurricanes move from southeast to northwest. While hurricanes do sometimes turn northward (remember the one last year that ended up near Iceland?), the Netherlands generally don't have to deal with storms of this ferocity.
Now's a good time. Opera's fixed all the clutter (which actually scared me off back in the 4.0 days as well, though I went to Mozilla instead of IE). I've got Opera and Firefox running with the same toolbars open, and they take up the same amount of space.
There's a dialog box that lets you choose either in the installer or the first time you run Opera, but I think if you upgrade from a version that only had graphical ads, it sticks with that setting until you go into the preferences.
If Microsoft were the underdog then sure, they'd also be doing clever marketing gimmicks to get you talking about them and increase market share.
And we even have documented proof in the form of Internet Explorer versions 1-4.
Ah, you're asking about package management, in which case Apt or Yum on Linux is actually more effective and almost as easy as the Windows Way(tm).
(Seriously, uninstalling an RPM or Debian package is much cleaner than uninstalling a Windows app.)
Or are you one of those people who is convinced that because everything was "./configure; make; make install" in the old days, everything still is?
Same here -- I have no idea how long it took me to discover that while I suffered through the right-click-and-go-through-a-window clunkiness. The problem is that we've become accustomed to system tray icons being things you right-click on instead of things you just click on.
With other browsers, each site could have its own window if I liked, and there weren't all those unusable screen areas like you got with Opera. Also, on my multi-desktop linux machine, I can have mozilla and/or firefox windows on all the desktops; Opera would only allow one window on one desktop. That's a good way to rule your app out among people who work with multiple desktops.
That's basically the experience I had too, though I used Opera as my main browser during the post-Netscape 4, pre-stable Mozilla days because it was the best non-IE browser available at the time. (I was really bitter at the underhanded tactics MS used to ensure victory, or I might have settled on IE - IE4 and NS4 were roughly comparable, but IE5 was considerably better than NS4.)
The problems have all been fixed over the course of versions 6 through 8, though. The extra UI can be hidden more easily than before, and you can have multiple Opera windows, each with its own set of tabs. With the same items visible in both browsers (toolbar, tabs, bookmark bar, and status bar), a registered (i.e. no-adbar) Opera takes up almost exactly the same amount of space with its UI that Firefox does. (Opera's actually a couple of pixels smaller than Firefox, though at modern screen sizes it hardly matters). Not surprisingly, I now use Opera a lot more than I used to!
The alpha releases (currently code-named "Deer Park") provide an option to force "new window" links to open in the current tab or in a new tab.
Most of the theaters in my area put "Please turn off your cell phones" in with the logos and stuff they run between the commercials and the film, right in there with "No Smoking" and "Please be quiet." I remember counting something like three different "TURN OFF YOUR PHONE" messages in just one showing.
People who yak on their phones during the movie don't even have the excuse of ignorance.
Then there are the commercials -- almost public service announcements, really -- that some cell phone company has been making (Cingular, I think), that start out with some dramatic scene (I can think of one submarine drama and one wire-fu duel) that gets interruted by a ringing cell phone, at which point the actors stop what they're doing and freak out. "What's that?" "It's coming from the audience!"
Long ago, they were in fact shown at the end of the film. But I can't imagine anyone today sitting through the credits to see them, most people make a bolt for the doors at the first sign the movie may be over.
Ah, this makes sense when combined with the fact that the credits used to be shown at the beginning, and they only included the most visible names. (You'd never see a credit for the third-unit assistant grip's hairdresser.) The movie ended, the words "The End" popped onscreen, and that was it -- that would have been the perfect time to tack on a trailer.
I don't mind the previews. Usually they target them by genre and there's a chance I might learn about an upcoming film I might like. (Yes, there's a lot of hedging in there.)
It's the @#%$! commercials that I can't stand! I already paid admission to get in to the theater, I don't need to sit here while you try to talk me into buying a new car/soda/deodorant/whatever, and I don't need to watch TV ads thinly disguised as entertainment "news" ("The Twenty," I'm talking about you!)
Second, "Faithful" doesn't need to be in the literal sense either. A film can be completely faithful to its source and still take large license.
Another example: the stage and film versions of Cabaret. The characters and situation were the same: a doomed affair between two expatriates (one America, one British) set against a Berlin cabaret on the eve of World War II -- but the decision to make all the songs be cabaret acts (with the exception of "Tomorrow Belongs to me") changed the plot almost completely. And yet both the stage version and the movie are very good.
Heh. I finally got around to seeing League of Extraordinary Gentlemen a few nights ago. Once I accepted that the only thing it had in common with the book was the title and the cast list, it was -- as you way -- fun as a mindless flick. Nothing I'd want to watch again, but at least not a total waste of an evening.
Though I suspect watching it under the influence of beer helped considerably.
Contrary? Not exactly. If you save power on the chip, you can afford a little more for the drive(s), though it does seem a bit too much like the "These are 'lite' cookies so I can eat twice as many" strategy.
Or all the classes I had in college where they explained that since hard drives were getting bigger and processors were getting faster, there was no point in trying to optimize your code. (Seriously!)
Old jokes never die... even when you want them to.
Anyone up for Badger Badger Llama Llama Hamster Dance?
Weird. In my area (southern California) it's Edwards/Regal that has the %#@$! 20. I go to AMC to avoid it.
Nah, #1-4 aren't problems. You can make a good sequel or adaptation, there are occasionally good remakes, and special effects aren't a problem (unless you mean relying entirely on effects).
#5 is the real issue. They're too busy over-engineering the story to water down anything that might lose audience, insert elements that the focus group things will pick up more people in X demographic. If Gone With the Wind were remade today, they'd add car chases (with horse and buggy), there would be bedroom scenes with Scarlett and each of her husbands, Rhett would have kick-ass fight scenes, Prissy would turn out to be a girl commando in the Northern army (and fully capable of delivering a baby), and the movie would be all about how the South deserved to lose.
Funny, just last week everyone was going off about how horrible it was that Microsoft was destroying RSS by renaming it as "Web Feeds," but now suddenly RSS has "won."
Yeah, because there's absolutely no possibilty that someone will write a program for Longhorn(Vista) that will support Atom.
(Picking up where the first set of sarcasm left off...)
None whatsoever. Not even Microsoft will touch it. Oh, wait!
For those who'd rather not read the article, it's from the Longhorn RSS team blog, and it's titled "Longhorn (hearts) Atom, too."
Yeah, this is kind of like saying "Service providers are now offering Linux in addition to FreeBSD, therefore, BSD is dying."
WTF????