I think you underestimate PayPal. They are the defacto standard, and lots of people have tried to duplicate them. eBay is the only real competition with BillPoint. Yahoo has failed, many banks have failed....
PayPal is also unique in that it offers protection from charge backs. As a small time eBay seller this is very important. In my experience, people who pay electronically are much more likely to pay (someone who says they'll send a money order only does it 50-75% of the time).
And, if I take a $400 electronic payment, I sure as hell better not get a chargeback in a month because some asshole knows they can get away with it.
So, let visa try their own payment service....everyone has paypal, paypal has those nice instant payment buttons, decent fees, good protection, and they accept international payments. I think they've already won.
Maybe now I'll be able to register a decent name. I don't really need it to be.com, I just want my little sites to have a short, easy to remember name. What they need to do now is make a lot more TLDs for various purposes.
Hopefully someone competent will put the system into place. Otherwise, you can be sure that Microsoft will make sure everyone knows that Linux screwed up the stock market. It needs to be rock solid and as flawless as possible.
I found it interesting that Bush's decision was devoid of ideology. If you are pro-life and believe these little clumps of cells are human life, then experimenting on some because they had already been killed is hardly a logical moral or ethical distinction.
If on the other hand, you believe they aren't life, then not experimenting on the other surplus embryos that will be discarded anyway is a poor decision because it holds back the progress of science in curing some terrible diseases and afflictions.
It appears Bush avoided an ideological decision and opted for the political decision that made everyone a bit happy with some reservations. This should have been an all or nothing decision.
This is a good idea to increase the stability of the OS, but Microsoft needs to allow you to CHOOSE to install unstable software if you so desire.
For example, a message should come up when you install that says:
WARNING: This software is known to cause Blue Screen of Death Syndrome, as well as chicken pox in small children. Do you wish to proceed?
Also, I would hope that sending BSOD dumps to Microsoft is optional....
The more I think about this, the more I think I need to do something to protect myself. I order a LOT of stuff online. And not just with the large companies, but with eBay sellers and Yahoo store sellers, etc.
I did get an American Express Blue card, though I haven't used it. Maybe it would be worth my time to get the smart card reader and generate those temporary CC numbers.
You may remember Nader and Joan Claybrook's crusade against seat belts and seat belt laws...They felt Americans were too stupid to wear seat belts. Instead, they wanted air bags, which they viewed as this magical pillow of air that would keep us all perfectly safe. In reality, Airbags tend to kill people if they aren't also wearing a seat belt.
But, as seat belt laws were enacted, usage increased dramatically. And, when they are made primary offenses (enough to be stopped by the police without any other reason), usage goes up even more to near 80%.
My point is, people need to know how and why to protect themselves. If we simply rely on technology and settings that come from the factory, security problems will only increase. Like airbags, good security settings are important. But they are only going to be effective when people view security as something that a proactive and responsible person concerns themselves with.
This is the same thing that Yahoo mail and many other email providers do. I have my email program set up to check around 10 addresses, and when I compose a message I choose which account to send it under. It then sends it through that account.... Therefore, it always matches the email address to the correct account.
If you have some specific reason to have different return addresses, like for customer service or something, just get your own host. This is for the best.
There have been some reports on sites that weren't blocked. I remember either at peacefire or the censorware project seeing something written where they tested the sites in adult categories on Yahoo, which are mostly static and have been there a while, and found a poor rate of blocking. It would make sense to block everything the search engines come up with since that is the easiest way for someone to find porn, but the censorware companies haven't taken that simple step.
Also, I recall that the most complete search engine has only cataloged about 10-15% of the internet. I think its safe to say that the censorware companies haven't even come close to searching this much of the net, and therefore the vast majority of porn is NOT going to be blocked.
using Censorware is like wrapping saran wrap around your monitor to protect your kids. It just doesn't work, and more importantly it CAN'T work from a technical point of view.
I'm not sure you understand what censorware claims to do. The companies say they don't block anything that isn't necessary, meaning they block only specific pages instead of whole sites.
The site you refer to has those glamor shots as you say, but only if you go several pages deep into the site. Therefore, the main page should not be blocked. Additionally, if you check out any of the other sites that were wrongfully blocked, they're even more obvious mistakes. Most of them are just 'under construction' pages.
This isn't intellectual property....calculating a shipping rate is calculating a shipping rate....just because it runs between two computers seems irrelevant. If it was a patent on the software's METHOD of calculation that would be one thing.
This seems to me like saying that you could patent the "Operating System" and then any new operating system that is programmed (be it MS, *NIX, etc.) is subject to royalty. What a crock of shit that is.
Maybe I'll get a patent on "Person to Person Communication via the vibration of vocal chords" and then charge you a royalty every time you speak!
I was an intern at Ford this year, and although I was in safety, I can tell you that the main problem is the batteries. They are expensive, and they don't hold enough energy to keep these cars going enough miles.
Its not just that there is no where to charge them up, that would be more commonplace if you could get more miles per charge. And if you could get more miles per charge, the demand would increase.
The fuel cells being developed sound pretty cool. If I remember right, they split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and use that for energy. These cells would increase the amount of energy batteries can store by a huge amount.
Another problem is that like any battery, these wear out as they are recharged more and more. And it would end up costing 20,000 dollars about every 10 years to replace them. Ouch. Right now every EV sold is subsidised by the goverment so much that the cost of the batteries is absorbed when initally purchased. But the technology truly is not that great, and until it improves I think that hybrid vehicles with super low emissions will be the thing to go to.
Incidentally, my friend in emissions told me that in some areas the new models of cars have such low emissions that the air coming out is actually cleaner than the air coming in!
From an environmental perspective, we should all keep in mind that diesel trucks contribute about 25% of the bad emissions, and are only about 4% of the vehicles. This is not a problem with deisel engines - Europe has some great diesel engines - but a problem with the crappy deisel's installed here in the U.S. An easy way to help the environment would be to develop and use better Deisel's here in the states.
I'm starting to get sick of everyone that sees a free, high quality service try to make some money and they throw a fit.
If you work your ass off to create the best search engine, aren't you entitled to a little dough, if you don't screw the site up in the process?
It really isn't that much for them to ask, and if I ever have something as successful as google I'd be insulted to hear people bitch because I want to move to an apartment where the kitchen isn't the same room as the bedroom...
All the top moderated comments seem to suggest that the ACLU is supporting government filtering...that was NOT what the article said.
What it said, was that at the same time they're saying COPA is bad because you can filter, they're also suing if anyone tries to filter because the software sucks so badly.
So, the point of the article is that the government is trying to use they're "no filtering" arguments to make the arguments against COPA ineffective by saying that filtering, in effect, is not a viable option.
Of course, this isn't much of a legal stance even though it seems on the surface to make sense.
In all honesty, MP3s have increased my CD purchasing, it's just that I can now choose what I want to purchase.
That is exactly what the RIAA ought to try to understand....I haven't really bought any CD's in 5+ years. The reason why, is that I would buy a CD because of a cool song on the radio and without fail every other song on the CD would suck.
Recently, I started using napster. I've downloaded about 10 songs, and now I have an interest in buying some of the CDs. The MP3's are said to be 'CD quality', but the ones I've gotten sure as hell aren't. They're not bad, but they're not CD quality. Maybe this is the fault of the people who are making them, but either way I wouldn't mind the real deal.
Furthermore, the RIAA had sales UP almost 20% last year, didn't they? Napster and MP3's have the potential to be HUGE marketing tools...they could start giving away or selling sample CDs with lower quality singles from a number of artists. Use the AOL-style guerilla marketing (send out a gazillion CDs until people give in an buy something).
What I like most about this article, is that this guy was sending 100,000-1,000,000 per WEEK to be able to sell 30-50 of those booklets per MONTH. I heard once that direct marketing should net you a 2% response rate, I never heard the 0.0000125% rate advertised! Oh, and to the person who said:
The "slashdot position" is that a little bit of censorship is like being a little bit pregnant. Yet the "slashdoterotti" are delighted to have censorship for spammers. Why? Spammers annoy them, porn doesn't.
I really don't think that it is censoring people to require that they tell the truth about what they're selling, and not falsifying return addresses and message paths. I mean, if someone knocked on your door in fireman gear, told you they needed to check a gas leak, and then when you let them in they tried to sell you a way make 123 billion dollars in 48 hours, you would probably be less than pleased. And if he gave you a card with the address and phone number of a random person who was going to get blindsided by your complains when you showed his ass the door, that wouldn't be too hot either.
Sorry to double post, but after considering my post for a while, I decided that I should mention that I do have a regular ISP that I use for everything internet related. AOL has one specific use for me, and the rest I don't use. Really, I'm getting sick of that one use now and I'm probably going to be done with it soon. Maybe there are 10 million others who will do the same...
I am very embarrassed to admit this, but I've had an AOL account for nearly 10 years. And I think AOL is the most horrible company in the world, it needs to be brought down. This must be why they have dozens of millions of customers, even the ones who hate them still are there.
I keep it because of a couple of games I got hooked on over there that I still like. I do currently have an overhead account though, so at least I'm not paying them. (I help out on one of the games).
AOL has poor software, bad graphics, they have no interest in pleasing customers, they have a bad non-standard mail client, they have a stripped down pathetic version of IE, and an AWFUL FTP client...it just goes on an on. The connection problems, the service outages, the lawsuits, etc.
That is another thing. I have never been more amused than to see AOL, Microsofts current top enemy and the owner of Netscape, using IE as its web browser. Its classic, and it makes me smile.
We can only hope I suppose that people are right this time, and AOL is at its peak and headed only downward. AOL is the exact opposite of what the internet should be. They focus on proprietary stuff, and make using the actual internet difficult. They're for censorship and control, not the freedom and flexibility of the internet.
I just hope that with the ownership of all these cable networks AOL doesn't find a way to become even bigger. Time Warner owns a lot of cable, but they also are missing a lot of cable...up in Michigan, at least in my area, we've got Mediaone. Mediaone sucks, but at least they're not AOL.
>>When you get it for free from the government, you play by their rules.
I seem to recall one of the biggest rules the government has is the first amendment, which has been used to overturn filtering laws time and time again. When someone does sue, the laws get struck down. What are the chances of anyone in little old Holland sueing though? Not great (I live in Ann arbor, not too far from there. Guess what, AA is considering filtering software now too...)
The worst part about filtering is that the filtering companies are sleazy. Almost sleazier than politicians! I have followed Peacefire, the student run anti-filtering group for a while, and they and other have found a lot of abuses by these companies. They block safe sex info, they block anti-censorship sites, they block YAHOO for gods sake. And they encrypt their list and lie about it so no one will know. Cyberwatch's president has been shown to have a pretty extreme conservative view.
And the worst part is, who ever hears about any of this stuff? I doubt your average voter realizes that they may not be able to access a site that discusses medical issues because the blocking software detected a medical word that sometimes is found on porn sites. One of the filtering products was found to be blocking the site for NOW, among others.
And there aren't any other good options either. I don't want to see the governement try making blocking software, they would probably screw it up worse than private companies.
The bottom line is that the filtering is extremely arbitrary, and it restricts the dissemination of information in a public place. This is simply illegal.
I think that people in general just hate to really say what they mean. When we're in a room with a bunch of other people, we don't want to be judged as immoral or deviant or anything, and so people tend to adopt a more conservative viewpoint than they might really believe. This also leads to people voting conservatively...I think there are more people with liberal views out there than are represented, but republicans always seem to win when they take tough stances on drugs and porn and abortion. As others have said, the people who vote tend to be the ones who are fighting for something....there are a lot more ultra conservatives out there than fringe voters, so they tend to win. Another thing that contributes is MONEY! We had a proposal last year to legalize assisted suicide in Michigan. If I recall correctly, polls showed that the public slightly supported it being legalized...but there were two sides. The group in favor of it which had little funding, and the coalition of churches and religious groups which have dumptrucks of cash....the bill was crushed, severely. There was more "VOTE NO ON B" advertising than I imagined was even possible. Religious groups have the money to campaign against this kind of thing, and they are a powerful tool for politicians, so they're glad to put in the same bill that just got declared unconstitutional just to please the religious groups. I wonder what it will be like a generation from now. I'm a college student, and I notice that there is a -LOT- of sex going on in my age group, and its much more open. Will we all grow up to be hypocritical prudes? I sure hope not....
I just wish I could find a good domain name at all, even if people can't telnet or ftp to my site. Who cares if you're putting up a website? I have all kinds of ideas for cool sites, but finding a name that doesn't suck and that is also isn't something like thisnameisntreallylong.com is impossible these days. I'm eagerly awaiting the new top level domains. If they're registering thousands of new domains daily, its hard to believe that there are any combos of english words left.
Slashdot Mirror
PayPal is also unique in that it offers protection from charge backs. As a small time eBay seller this is very important. In my experience, people who pay electronically are much more likely to pay (someone who says they'll send a money order only does it 50-75% of the time).
And, if I take a $400 electronic payment, I sure as hell better not get a chargeback in a month because some asshole knows they can get away with it.
So, let visa try their own payment service....everyone has paypal, paypal has those nice instant payment buttons, decent fees, good protection, and they accept international payments. I think they've already won.
Maybe now I'll be able to register a decent name. I don't really need it to be .com, I just want my little sites to have a short, easy to remember name. What they need to do now is make a lot more TLDs for various purposes.
Hopefully someone competent will put the system into place. Otherwise, you can be sure that Microsoft will make sure everyone knows that Linux screwed up the stock market. It needs to be rock solid and as flawless as possible.
If on the other hand, you believe they aren't life, then not experimenting on the other surplus embryos that will be discarded anyway is a poor decision because it holds back the progress of science in curing some terrible diseases and afflictions.
It appears Bush avoided an ideological decision and opted for the political decision that made everyone a bit happy with some reservations. This should have been an all or nothing decision.
For example, a message should come up when you install that says:
WARNING: This software is known to cause Blue Screen of Death Syndrome, as well as chicken pox in small children. Do you wish to proceed?
Also, I would hope that sending BSOD dumps to Microsoft is optional....
I did get an American Express Blue card, though I haven't used it. Maybe it would be worth my time to get the smart card reader and generate those temporary CC numbers.
But, as seat belt laws were enacted, usage increased dramatically. And, when they are made primary offenses (enough to be stopped by the police without any other reason), usage goes up even more to near 80%.
My point is, people need to know how and why to protect themselves. If we simply rely on technology and settings that come from the factory, security problems will only increase. Like airbags, good security settings are important. But they are only going to be effective when people view security as something that a proactive and responsible person concerns themselves with.
This is the same thing that Yahoo mail and many other email providers do. I have my email program set up to check around 10 addresses, and when I compose a message I choose which account to send it under. It then sends it through that account.... Therefore, it always matches the email address to the correct account.
If you have some specific reason to have different return addresses, like for customer service or something, just get your own host. This is for the best.
Also, I recall that the most complete search engine has only cataloged about 10-15% of the internet. I think its safe to say that the censorware companies haven't even come close to searching this much of the net, and therefore the vast majority of porn is NOT going to be blocked.
using Censorware is like wrapping saran wrap around your monitor to protect your kids. It just doesn't work, and more importantly it CAN'T work from a technical point of view.
The site you refer to has those glamor shots as you say, but only if you go several pages deep into the site. Therefore, the main page should not be blocked. Additionally, if you check out any of the other sites that were wrongfully blocked, they're even more obvious mistakes. Most of them are just 'under construction' pages.
This seems to me like saying that you could patent the "Operating System" and then any new operating system that is programmed (be it MS, *NIX, etc.) is subject to royalty. What a crock of shit that is.
Maybe I'll get a patent on "Person to Person Communication via the vibration of vocal chords" and then charge you a royalty every time you speak!
Its not just that there is no where to charge them up, that would be more commonplace if you could get more miles per charge. And if you could get more miles per charge, the demand would increase.
The fuel cells being developed sound pretty cool. If I remember right, they split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and use that for energy. These cells would increase the amount of energy batteries can store by a huge amount.
Another problem is that like any battery, these wear out as they are recharged more and more. And it would end up costing 20,000 dollars about every 10 years to replace them. Ouch. Right now every EV sold is subsidised by the goverment so much that the cost of the batteries is absorbed when initally purchased. But the technology truly is not that great, and until it improves I think that hybrid vehicles with super low emissions will be the thing to go to.
Incidentally, my friend in emissions told me that in some areas the new models of cars have such low emissions that the air coming out is actually cleaner than the air coming in!
From an environmental perspective, we should all keep in mind that diesel trucks contribute about 25% of the bad emissions, and are only about 4% of the vehicles. This is not a problem with deisel engines - Europe has some great diesel engines - but a problem with the crappy deisel's installed here in the U.S. An easy way to help the environment would be to develop and use better Deisel's here in the states.
If you work your ass off to create the best search engine, aren't you entitled to a little dough, if you don't screw the site up in the process?
It really isn't that much for them to ask, and if I ever have something as successful as google I'd be insulted to hear people bitch because I want to move to an apartment where the kitchen isn't the same room as the bedroom...
What it said, was that at the same time they're saying COPA is bad because you can filter, they're also suing if anyone tries to filter because the software sucks so badly.
So, the point of the article is that the government is trying to use they're "no filtering" arguments to make the arguments against COPA ineffective by saying that filtering, in effect, is not a viable option.
Of course, this isn't much of a legal stance even though it seems on the surface to make sense.
That is exactly what the RIAA ought to try to understand....I haven't really bought any CD's in 5+ years. The reason why, is that I would buy a CD because of a cool song on the radio and without fail every other song on the CD would suck.
Recently, I started using napster. I've downloaded about 10 songs, and now I have an interest in buying some of the CDs. The MP3's are said to be 'CD quality', but the ones I've gotten sure as hell aren't. They're not bad, but they're not CD quality. Maybe this is the fault of the people who are making them, but either way I wouldn't mind the real deal.
Furthermore, the RIAA had sales UP almost 20% last year, didn't they? Napster and MP3's have the potential to be HUGE marketing tools...they could start giving away or selling sample CDs with lower quality singles from a number of artists. Use the AOL-style guerilla marketing (send out a gazillion CDs until people give in an buy something).
I really don't think that it is censoring people to require that they tell the truth about what they're selling, and not falsifying return addresses and message paths. I mean, if someone knocked on your door in fireman gear, told you they needed to check a gas leak, and then when you let them in they tried to sell you a way make 123 billion dollars in 48 hours, you would probably be less than pleased. And if he gave you a card with the address and phone number of a random person who was going to get blindsided by your complains when you showed his ass the door, that wouldn't be too hot either.
Sorry to double post, but after considering my post for a while, I decided that I should mention that I do have a regular ISP that I use for everything internet related. AOL has one specific use for me, and the rest I don't use. Really, I'm getting sick of that one use now and I'm probably going to be done with it soon. Maybe there are 10 million others who will do the same...
I keep it because of a couple of games I got hooked on over there that I still like. I do currently have an overhead account though, so at least I'm not paying them. (I help out on one of the games).
AOL has poor software, bad graphics, they have no interest in pleasing customers, they have a bad non-standard mail client, they have a stripped down pathetic version of IE, and an AWFUL FTP client...it just goes on an on. The connection problems, the service outages, the lawsuits, etc.
That is another thing. I have never been more amused than to see AOL, Microsofts current top enemy and the owner of Netscape, using IE as its web browser. Its classic, and it makes me smile.
We can only hope I suppose that people are right this time, and AOL is at its peak and headed only downward. AOL is the exact opposite of what the internet should be. They focus on proprietary stuff, and make using the actual internet difficult. They're for censorship and control, not the freedom and flexibility of the internet.
I just hope that with the ownership of all these cable networks AOL doesn't find a way to become even bigger. Time Warner owns a lot of cable, but they also are missing a lot of cable...up in Michigan, at least in my area, we've got Mediaone. Mediaone sucks, but at least they're not AOL.
I seem to recall one of the biggest rules the government has is the first amendment, which has been used to overturn filtering laws time and time again. When someone does sue, the laws get struck down. What are the chances of anyone in little old Holland sueing though? Not great (I live in Ann arbor, not too far from there. Guess what, AA is considering filtering software now too...)
The worst part about filtering is that the filtering companies are sleazy. Almost sleazier than politicians! I have followed Peacefire, the student run anti-filtering group for a while, and they and other have found a lot of abuses by these companies. They block safe sex info, they block anti-censorship sites, they block YAHOO for gods sake. And they encrypt their list and lie about it so no one will know. Cyberwatch's president has been shown to have a pretty extreme conservative view.
And the worst part is, who ever hears about any of this stuff? I doubt your average voter realizes that they may not be able to access a site that discusses medical issues because the blocking software detected a medical word that sometimes is found on porn sites. One of the filtering products was found to be blocking the site for NOW, among others.
And there aren't any other good options either. I don't want to see the governement try making blocking software, they would probably screw it up worse than private companies.
The bottom line is that the filtering is extremely arbitrary, and it restricts the dissemination of information in a public place. This is simply illegal.
I think that people in general just hate to really say what they mean. When we're in a room with a bunch of other people, we don't want to be judged as immoral or deviant or anything, and so people tend to adopt a more conservative viewpoint than they might really believe. This also leads to people voting conservatively...I think there are more people with liberal views out there than are represented, but republicans always seem to win when they take tough stances on drugs and porn and abortion. As others have said, the people who vote tend to be the ones who are fighting for something....there are a lot more ultra conservatives out there than fringe voters, so they tend to win. Another thing that contributes is MONEY! We had a proposal last year to legalize assisted suicide in Michigan. If I recall correctly, polls showed that the public slightly supported it being legalized...but there were two sides. The group in favor of it which had little funding, and the coalition of churches and religious groups which have dumptrucks of cash....the bill was crushed, severely. There was more "VOTE NO ON B" advertising than I imagined was even possible. Religious groups have the money to campaign against this kind of thing, and they are a powerful tool for politicians, so they're glad to put in the same bill that just got declared unconstitutional just to please the religious groups. I wonder what it will be like a generation from now. I'm a college student, and I notice that there is a -LOT- of sex going on in my age group, and its much more open. Will we all grow up to be hypocritical prudes? I sure hope not....
I just wish I could find a good domain name at all, even if people can't telnet or ftp to my site. Who cares if you're putting up a website? I have all kinds of ideas for cool sites, but finding a name that doesn't suck and that is also isn't something like thisnameisntreallylong.com is impossible these days. I'm eagerly awaiting the new top level domains. If they're registering thousands of new domains daily, its hard to believe that there are any combos of english words left.