Drives me nuts sometimes is an understatement. How about, "Drives me into fits of frothing homocidal rage"? I've generally tricked myself into appreciating her willingness to keep the house decluttered, but there are times when I desperately need $thing and find that she's arbitrarily "put it away", usually someplace totally illogical and the last place I look, and I tear the house apart, growing more and more pissed each time I demolish a "storage location" looking for something.
I'll even admit to hiding something of hers on occasion, simply to make a point about her "organization." Which is totally juvenile, but it really represents how batty her lack of logic makes me.
Thank you for so concisely expressing exactly what my wife does as well.
I wish I had a *why* for it, though. There's clearly something going on about how the genders define cleanliness and the logic applied to organization. I sometimes suspect my wife doesn't even *care* about logical organization, or at least it doesn't enter her mind. I'm more concerned with logical organization than overall cleanliness, and I often find myself settling for "chaos" organization if the resources (containers, cabinets, etc) don't exist to logically organize.
An interesting observation. On a related note, I've noticed that a lot of "messy" people seem to know where everything is. I call it the chaos theory of organization; it can often be easier to remember where things are than to spend the effort to put them someplace. So you just put them where there's space, and remember where they went.
My wife has what I call the pro-aesthetic theory of organization; if a room or place appears to be neat, it's organized -- even if the stuff is put away without any regard to an organizational structure (eg, related items aren't in the same cabinet or closet). It's important for the room to look clean, even if in reality its a highly user unfriendly mode of organization.
When you contrast the former and the latter, it's an interesting mix -- on one hand, you have a visual mess but things are relatively easy to find. On the other hand, you have visual neatness, but things are hard to find since there's no scheme (other than size and volume) as to where things went.
As far as laziness goes, I've known neat freaks that never get anything done because the overhead cost of neatness eliminates their time.
Well, since I don't have the $20K it would take to start a venture like that, I think it will remain just talk, just as if I'd been talking about raising a people's army and seizing control of the state.
It's not a terrible idea, in fact, it'd be cool if there was a RAID-5-type redundancy built into the storage device itself so that flash failures wouldn't shitcan the entire data store.
Isn't this just a new twist on an old problem -- poorly documented estates?
My dad, for example, has three mortgaged investment properties in Arizona, a motorhome, a car, and a safety deposit box. That I know about. I have no idea what his bank accounts are, what other real estate he might own, what his liabilities are, or what other assets he might have.
Your electronic data is just another element of the poorly documented estate, and probably the least important one, unless you're someone truly interesting and have various letters and correspondence someone else might care about.
I dread dad dying unexpectedly. Not only will it be a personal loss, but it will be a huge PITA to get his estate sorted. Dad had a ton of problems when mom died, and she was his wife and he inhereted all of her stuff by default. At least I know enough to bee-line to the safety deposit box (for which I have a key) and to take out all the gold...
The big long distance players (well, some of them at least) use a variation on this. They send you a check for some small but meaningful amount ($2 to $10 US) and tell you it is a gift/rebate/etc. In the fine print on the back of the check just below where you endorse it you see that the act of endorsing and cashing that check signs you up for brand X long distance at a minimum rate of $14.95 per month or some such.
This was largely my inspiration after chasing down these kinds of surcharges on our phone bill at work. As it happens, someone in our finance department deposited a few of these checks. The perp in each case was "yp.net", and the "services" we signed up for were internet service and, most uselessly, a "listing" on "yellowpages.net".
As much as I admit its a pretty slimy thing to do, I have to give them a certain amount of credit -- you only get signed up if you're not paying attention. Their customer service was actually quite good, promptly cancelling our "accounts" and even faxing a cancelled check when asked for it.
I'm not entirely sympathetic to the "CD's must be $5" idea, though. An album with $5M in production costs has to sell at least 1M copies at $5 to make back the production costs, and that doesn't include any distribution overhead or manufacturing costs.
$10 is probably more reasonable for any album, with the smart play to price oldies that have already paid for themselves to be at $5.
OK, to appease all the slashbots who assume I'm an asshat, I'm only TALKING about doing this, not actually doing it.
I'm not talking about "demanding" that any recipient of a bill pay me, just asking that they pay. There would be no threat, actual or implied, that any action would be taken if they didn't pay, other than cancellation of their service.
The reason a friend and I discussed this at all, was it seems that it's exactly the kind of business ethics that our corporate overlords seem to use, so I figured why can't *I* take advantage of this?
It's hard to see how it would be actually illegal, since there really would be a basic ISP service available. The only thing about it would be the ethics of taking money from people who don't pay attention.
Now they just send the bill without any goods, and remarkably people pay them.
I've been trying to convince a friend that we need to start a business providing a legitimate (ie, you'd actually be able to use it) service that nobody needs or wants and just "sign people up" for it and send them bills. Those that paid the bill got their accounts left active, and those who didn't pay the first two bills we'd cancel until we tried them again.
The business we thought we'd set up was "internet service" -- buy a PRI and a dial access router, a 768K DSL line, throw up a couple of BSD boxes for email and web hosting in our garage and we'd have a real, plausable service in case someone complained.
The "service" overhead would be trivial, like maybe $2k a month, and the rest of our costs would be in direct mailing our bills to customers. I'm not sure where you as an individual can buy business mailing lists, but if we did the mailings ourselves, we could possibly only have $5-8K a month in gross overhead costs.
If you get only a 15% return rate for $24.95 per month on 120,000 bills sent, it's not hard to see a gross income of $500,000 per year.
The DVD/CD pricing disparity has always puzzled me. The DVD costs at least as much to make as the CD, and a lot of movies don't make any money until they are released on DVD, meaning that the much more expensive to make film is capable of making money off of the proportionally-lower-priced DVD.
It would surprise me if even a prima donna artist heavy on production (Spears, Jackson, et all) spends more than $5 million making a record. I'm sure more than that is spent during the making of the record (dope, whores, lawyers, and other 10 percenters), but not technically on the production of the record.
Yet the record is expected to sell for about what the DVD sells for.
I doubt copper is going anywhere, if anything because the cabling and connectors are more rugged, simpler to implement and far less expensive. AFAIK copper has kept pace with fiber in the speed department, and, if our company is any indication, for the vast majority of end-luser connections 100Mbit speeds are seldom exceeded anyway. Yes, I know this is a 640K-type argument that doesn't apply to everyone or to server core networks.
Copper can also grow -- I wouldn't be surprised if some future flavor of ethernet moved to a 6 pair cable. It'd break the Cat5 standard in place, but if you've been around long enough you'd know that Cat5 requirements pushed out a lot of Cat3 cable plants as well.
O.k. all we need to do in this country is figure out how to intergate the base stations into regular lightbulbs and street lights for no extra cost. Then we could all have a unlimited wireless bandwidth anywhere.
Almost a sane idea, except I'm thinking of traffic lights, not street lights -- they either have or need signalling capability to the control center, and they're everywhere. All you need to do is make metropolitan wireless broadband and re-doing traffic lights a high priority.
As long as consumer routing remains profitable, they'll keep making the devices. What they'll do, though, is much better overlap management.
Keep some features totally out of the consumer product, and those that the market demands will be hobbled in some way that severely limits their usability in a real network environment.
Hand jobs seem perfectly plausable (a coat seeming more comfortable/practical than a modified popcorn box), and blow jobs possible in the right circumstances, but "making out" (arms wrapped around, relentlessly kissing) just seems bizzarre. I've never seen it practiced in a theater, either, and I'm old enough to actually have frequented some of the old style movie theaters.
Perhaps the practice has just moved home, as people watch videos in the basement away from parents.
Re:RICO, RICO, RICO
on
NYT on Spam Cops
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
After all, if you can charge the isp (who most likely is in no way responsible for the spam other than having end users with compromized boxen) why not them as well.
The crux of my comment (which I apparently didn't make clear) was that spammers get a lot of cooperation from the legitimate business world. If the legitimate business world that supplies them is aware of what the spammer is doing, they *are* part of the conspiracy and a member of an ad-hoc criminal enterprise.
"I didn't know" is only good for so far, until somebody turns (and somebody always turns, even in the Mafia) and squeals about the ISP who gets extra money to mask the spammers efforts, the credit card processor/bank burying customer complaints and refusing to issue chargebacks in exchange for $$$$.
It's a nice techno-fantasy to believe that all spam is spread by 0wned hosts from rogues running off of DSL living in their parent's basement. But it's naive to think that these spammers aren't living in the real world, using real-world resources to run their crooked enterprises, and that these real-world resources are totally ignorant.
Does anyone "make out" in theaters anymore? That may have been possible in the 1960s when the gigantic single-screen theaters with lots of dark corners and balcony space were still in service, but in today's shoe box, you'd be right out in the middle of everyone.
Perhaps it would be possible in the top row of a large stadium-seating theater during a lightly attended movie, but at that point, wouldn't the back seat of a car in an empty car park be more private?
It's time for some RICO investigations! Let's throw some people from ISPs and banks into the mix as well -- spamming and scamming really is a racket, and these people need to do some hard jail time. Dragging in people from the "legitimate" business world will go a long way towards making spam hard to do and keep spammers from the support systems they need to do business.
The banking angle is especially important! If these scammers can't do credit cards, they will be hard pressed to run their businesses. While I'm sure there are people dumb enough to send cash, most people can't be bothered to do that much work.
what that means is that the opinion of the silent majority is being moved toward "angry mob" status, which, I believe will lead to the downfall of the Spam Kings.
Spam is too deeply involved with big business, either as direct suppliers (premium cost network connectivity, credit card services), or tangental involvement (list selling). Besides, the "silent majority" hated telemarking for *how long* before we got the fairly limp no-call list?
If the government actually had an interest in stopping spamming, they would have done a RICO investigation of some of the more fraudulent spammed products and put everyone remotely connected up on several dozen federal racketeering, conspiracy, fraud and other charges that would have sent them all away to Club Fed for a decade, as well as encouraging many smaller spam entrepeneurs to go back to hawking Herbalife in RV parks.
But we've seen little if any spam-related prosecution, only civil suit efforts by major ISPs. I'm pretty convinced that the Feds have been told it's a non-priority, partly due to Asscroft's terrorism paranoia, and partly because big business wants to keep spam as an option.
...is it kind of thin? I mean, multiple drug busts, the last one involving a firearm? I'll be the last one to criticize him for smoking dope, but it's not like it helps his credibility.
Probably more damaging is the fact that the music industry he's most familiar with is that of the 1970s, not that of the contemporary industry. Sure, he's involved, but as a veteran/player, not as an up-and-coming musician.
What's always the missing element is bridging to the POTS world. I've often wondered if you could get a mesh network going where each mesh entity provides a POTS bridge for calls local to their calling area, allowing for "free" long distance calls and connectivity to the POTS world.
It's not clear how you'd enable bridging POTS to VoIP; perhaps a calling-card type setup where you would call a local access number that would round-robin try various local mesh POTS bridges that would route calls to the respective VoIP termination point.
The whole thing needs most everyone to provide POTS bridging capability to their system. However, routing inbound calls to VoIP nodes requires an identifier, and if you make a phone number the indentifier it might encourage membership in the mesh. Outbound VoIP to POTS wouldn't need a phone number, but you could increase the priority of them for those providing POTS bridging.
Isn't it "political" when the right-to-vote is denied those who've completed their sentences? That, due to the higher numbers of black Americans passing through the prison system - FAR more B.A. are being denied the right-to-vote?
Commit a felony, you lose the right to vote. This is neither new, nor a conspiracy to disenfranchise any population group in the US. Religious beliefs and political speech in the US aren't felonies. In China, they are crimes that can lead to long jail sentences and in some cases, execution (such as exposing government activity that would otherwise be open in the U.S.). Also, felons can petition to regain their civil rights once they've served their sentences. It's not an automatic lifetime loss.
I notice that you ignored the "slave labour" issue?
Prison industries in the US are very seldom competitors with private industry; government competition with private industry in for-profit business is usually illegal or very unpopular. In most places, prison industry either supports the prison population directly (laundry, food service, textiles, farming, equipment repair) or the government generally -- Minnesota's prison industry produces a lot of the furniture used in government offices, as well as the ubiquitous production of license plates.
It's primarily self-supporting industries to support the prison population itself or the government generally, not for the profit of private indivuduals or government bureaucrats. Furthermore, the industries provide often badly needed vocational education for inmates.
How many were incarcerated for belonging to a religion? For advocating a free and open government? For advocating Democracy?
It's a dubious argument that the incarceration of black men on drug and theft charges represents a political incarceration; these people weren't pursuing drugs or crime as a political statement.
The drug laws are broken, but that hardly means people incarcerated for them are political prisoners.
Secondly if they have to buy domains they need to pay for them - that leaves a physical paper trail to spammers, now legislation can help.
Sorry, but I have to hit the bullshit button. Legislation hasn't helped yet, and I'm not talking about CAN-SPAM or any of the other anti-bulk mail bills, but the existing laws dealing with all manner of fraud, FDA regulations and any of the other various and sundry state and federal laws regulating the almost-universally fraudulent commercial content of spam.
You're suffering from the same delusion that many people, myself included, often suffer from -- "Can't we pass a *law*"? -- when there are many good laws already on the books that better deal with the problem in general.
I'd suggest a RICO investigation into some of the top-level spammers, their clients, and the people involved in the payments, the network access, and find out how dirty they really are. I don't know, but I suspect, that most of these people know they're involved in deeply fraudulent activity. A few racketeering convictions involving major ISPs, banks, spammers, and their business clients with some noisy investigation of other spammers could have a *real* impact -- squeezing the spammers out of ISP suppliers and banking services they literally can't do business without.
My suggestion is LCD RPTV. I have a 42" Sony Grand Wega III LCD, which I chose after careful reading of AVSForum and a lot of time in the showroom.
The DLPs looked OK, but their standard-def (SD) picture was really rough, and overall there was something kind of hard-edged about the picture; it looked as if it had been through too much digital processing.
The Sony LCD appeared to have a smoother, more film-like appearance, and much better SD picture quality.
Much of what I still watch is in SD, so SD PQ was important. They were both stunning with DVDs and HD content.
After 8 months with my Sony, the only real complaint I have is what I call "black crush" -- all black is pretty good, but there's not enough variation in near-blacks, and shadowy or night scenes can lose detail. It's less apparent to not apparent on HD broadcasts and DVDs.
No thinking person denies there are problems with the US system of government, it's current government, and many of the social, political and economic systems we have here.
However, we all know it. We talk about it constantly. We publish newspapers, magazines, and TV shows that display content critical of the government. We protest, rally, demonstrate. We lampoon our past and present leaders, demand (and often get!) changes in leadership and policy.
By and large, we don't kill our own people for it. We don't run slave labor camps, populated by people whose opinion on political matters differs from that of the government.
The Chinese do. China is a police state, run by dictators. It's not a democracy. There is no freedom of expression. Don't confuse the limited expression of economic capitalism in China with individual liberty.
Is the US system perfect? Hell no! Would you trade your life here for a life in China? I wouldn't.
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It drives me nuts, sometimes
Drives me nuts sometimes is an understatement. How about, "Drives me into fits of frothing homocidal rage"? I've generally tricked myself into appreciating her willingness to keep the house decluttered, but there are times when I desperately need $thing and find that she's arbitrarily "put it away", usually someplace totally illogical and the last place I look, and I tear the house apart, growing more and more pissed each time I demolish a "storage location" looking for something.
I'll even admit to hiding something of hers on occasion, simply to make a point about her "organization." Which is totally juvenile, but it really represents how batty her lack of logic makes me.
Thank you for so concisely expressing exactly what my wife does as well.
I wish I had a *why* for it, though. There's clearly something going on about how the genders define cleanliness and the logic applied to organization. I sometimes suspect my wife doesn't even *care* about logical organization, or at least it doesn't enter her mind. I'm more concerned with logical organization than overall cleanliness, and I often find myself settling for "chaos" organization if the resources (containers, cabinets, etc) don't exist to logically organize.
An interesting observation. On a related note, I've noticed that a lot of "messy" people seem to know where everything is. I call it the chaos theory of organization; it can often be easier to remember where things are than to spend the effort to put them someplace. So you just put them where there's space, and remember where they went.
My wife has what I call the pro-aesthetic theory of organization; if a room or place appears to be neat, it's organized -- even if the stuff is put away without any regard to an organizational structure (eg, related items aren't in the same cabinet or closet). It's important for the room to look clean, even if in reality its a highly user unfriendly mode of organization.
When you contrast the former and the latter, it's an interesting mix -- on one hand, you have a visual mess but things are relatively easy to find. On the other hand, you have visual neatness, but things are hard to find since there's no scheme (other than size and volume) as to where things went.
As far as laziness goes, I've known neat freaks that never get anything done because the overhead cost of neatness eliminates their time.
Well, since I don't have the $20K it would take to start a venture like that, I think it will remain just talk, just as if I'd been talking about raising a people's army and seizing control of the state.
It's not a terrible idea, in fact, it'd be cool if there was a RAID-5-type redundancy built into the storage device itself so that flash failures wouldn't shitcan the entire data store.
Isn't this just a new twist on an old problem -- poorly documented estates?
My dad, for example, has three mortgaged investment properties in Arizona, a motorhome, a car, and a safety deposit box. That I know about. I have no idea what his bank accounts are, what other real estate he might own, what his liabilities are, or what other assets he might have.
Your electronic data is just another element of the poorly documented estate, and probably the least important one, unless you're someone truly interesting and have various letters and correspondence someone else might care about.
I dread dad dying unexpectedly. Not only will it be a personal loss, but it will be a huge PITA to get his estate sorted. Dad had a ton of problems when mom died, and she was his wife and he inhereted all of her stuff by default. At least I know enough to bee-line to the safety deposit box (for which I have a key) and to take out all the gold...
The big long distance players (well, some of them at least) use a variation on this. They send you a check for some small but meaningful amount ($2 to $10 US) and tell you it is a gift/rebate/etc. In the fine print on the back of the check just below where you endorse it you see that the act of endorsing and cashing that check signs you up for brand X long distance at a minimum rate of $14.95 per month or some such.
This was largely my inspiration after chasing down these kinds of surcharges on our phone bill at work. As it happens, someone in our finance department deposited a few of these checks. The perp in each case was "yp.net", and the "services" we signed up for were internet service and, most uselessly, a "listing" on "yellowpages.net".
As much as I admit its a pretty slimy thing to do, I have to give them a certain amount of credit -- you only get signed up if you're not paying attention. Their customer service was actually quite good, promptly cancelling our "accounts" and even faxing a cancelled check when asked for it.
I'm not entirely sympathetic to the "CD's must be $5" idea, though. An album with $5M in production costs has to sell at least 1M copies at $5 to make back the production costs, and that doesn't include any distribution overhead or manufacturing costs.
$10 is probably more reasonable for any album, with the smart play to price oldies that have already paid for themselves to be at $5.
OK, to appease all the slashbots who assume I'm an asshat, I'm only TALKING about doing this, not actually doing it.
I'm not talking about "demanding" that any recipient of a bill pay me, just asking that they pay. There would be no threat, actual or implied, that any action would be taken if they didn't pay, other than cancellation of their service.
The reason a friend and I discussed this at all, was it seems that it's exactly the kind of business ethics that our corporate overlords seem to use, so I figured why can't *I* take advantage of this?
It's hard to see how it would be actually illegal, since there really would be a basic ISP service available. The only thing about it would be the ethics of taking money from people who don't pay attention.
Now they just send the bill without any goods, and remarkably people pay them.
I've been trying to convince a friend that we need to start a business providing a legitimate (ie, you'd actually be able to use it) service that nobody needs or wants and just "sign people up" for it and send them bills. Those that paid the bill got their accounts left active, and those who didn't pay the first two bills we'd cancel until we tried them again.
The business we thought we'd set up was "internet service" -- buy a PRI and a dial access router, a 768K DSL line, throw up a couple of BSD boxes for email and web hosting in our garage and we'd have a real, plausable service in case someone complained.
The "service" overhead would be trivial, like maybe $2k a month, and the rest of our costs would be in direct mailing our bills to customers. I'm not sure where you as an individual can buy business mailing lists, but if we did the mailings ourselves, we could possibly only have $5-8K a month in gross overhead costs.
If you get only a 15% return rate for $24.95 per month on 120,000 bills sent, it's not hard to see a gross income of $500,000 per year.
I'm not even sure it's illegal, either.
The DVD/CD pricing disparity has always puzzled me. The DVD costs at least as much to make as the CD, and a lot of movies don't make any money until they are released on DVD, meaning that the much more expensive to make film is capable of making money off of the proportionally-lower-priced DVD.
It would surprise me if even a prima donna artist heavy on production (Spears, Jackson, et all) spends more than $5 million making a record. I'm sure more than that is spent during the making of the record (dope, whores, lawyers, and other 10 percenters), but not technically on the production of the record.
Yet the record is expected to sell for about what the DVD sells for.
I doubt copper is going anywhere, if anything because the cabling and connectors are more rugged, simpler to implement and far less expensive. AFAIK copper has kept pace with fiber in the speed department, and, if our company is any indication, for the vast majority of end-luser connections 100Mbit speeds are seldom exceeded anyway. Yes, I know this is a 640K-type argument that doesn't apply to everyone or to server core networks.
Copper can also grow -- I wouldn't be surprised if some future flavor of ethernet moved to a 6 pair cable. It'd break the Cat5 standard in place, but if you've been around long enough you'd know that Cat5 requirements pushed out a lot of Cat3 cable plants as well.
O.k. all we need to do in this country is figure out how to intergate the base stations into regular lightbulbs and street lights for no extra cost. Then we could all have a unlimited wireless bandwidth anywhere.
Almost a sane idea, except I'm thinking of traffic lights, not street lights -- they either have or need signalling capability to the control center, and they're everywhere. All you need to do is make metropolitan wireless broadband and re-doing traffic lights a high priority.
As long as consumer routing remains profitable, they'll keep making the devices. What they'll do, though, is much better overlap management.
Keep some features totally out of the consumer product, and those that the market demands will be hobbled in some way that severely limits their usability in a real network environment.
Hand jobs seem perfectly plausable (a coat seeming more comfortable/practical than a modified popcorn box), and blow jobs possible in the right circumstances, but "making out" (arms wrapped around, relentlessly kissing) just seems bizzarre. I've never seen it practiced in a theater, either, and I'm old enough to actually have frequented some of the old style movie theaters.
Perhaps the practice has just moved home, as people watch videos in the basement away from parents.
After all, if you can charge the isp (who most likely is in no way responsible for the spam other than having end users with compromized boxen) why not them as well.
The crux of my comment (which I apparently didn't make clear) was that spammers get a lot of cooperation from the legitimate business world. If the legitimate business world that supplies them is aware of what the spammer is doing, they *are* part of the conspiracy and a member of an ad-hoc criminal enterprise.
"I didn't know" is only good for so far, until somebody turns (and somebody always turns, even in the Mafia) and squeals about the ISP who gets extra money to mask the spammers efforts, the credit card processor/bank burying customer complaints and refusing to issue chargebacks in exchange for $$$$.
It's a nice techno-fantasy to believe that all spam is spread by 0wned hosts from rogues running off of DSL living in their parent's basement. But it's naive to think that these spammers aren't living in the real world, using real-world resources to run their crooked enterprises, and that these real-world resources are totally ignorant.
Does anyone "make out" in theaters anymore? That may have been possible in the 1960s when the gigantic single-screen theaters with lots of dark corners and balcony space were still in service, but in today's shoe box, you'd be right out in the middle of everyone.
Perhaps it would be possible in the top row of a large stadium-seating theater during a lightly attended movie, but at that point, wouldn't the back seat of a car in an empty car park be more private?
It's time for some RICO investigations! Let's throw some people from ISPs and banks into the mix as well -- spamming and scamming really is a racket, and these people need to do some hard jail time. Dragging in people from the "legitimate" business world will go a long way towards making spam hard to do and keep spammers from the support systems they need to do business.
The banking angle is especially important! If these scammers can't do credit cards, they will be hard pressed to run their businesses. While I'm sure there are people dumb enough to send cash, most people can't be bothered to do that much work.
what that means is that the opinion of the silent majority is being moved toward "angry mob" status, which, I believe will lead to the downfall of the Spam Kings.
Spam is too deeply involved with big business, either as direct suppliers (premium cost network connectivity, credit card services), or tangental involvement (list selling). Besides, the "silent majority" hated telemarking for *how long* before we got the fairly limp no-call list?
If the government actually had an interest in stopping spamming, they would have done a RICO investigation of some of the more fraudulent spammed products and put everyone remotely connected up on several dozen federal racketeering, conspiracy, fraud and other charges that would have sent them all away to Club Fed for a decade, as well as encouraging many smaller spam entrepeneurs to go back to hawking Herbalife in RV parks.
But we've seen little if any spam-related prosecution, only civil suit efforts by major ISPs. I'm pretty convinced that the Feds have been told it's a non-priority, partly due to Asscroft's terrorism paranoia, and partly because big business wants to keep spam as an option.
...is it kind of thin? I mean, multiple drug busts, the last one involving a firearm? I'll be the last one to criticize him for smoking dope, but it's not like it helps his credibility.
Probably more damaging is the fact that the music industry he's most familiar with is that of the 1970s, not that of the contemporary industry. Sure, he's involved, but as a veteran/player, not as an up-and-coming musician.
What's always the missing element is bridging to the POTS world. I've often wondered if you could get a mesh network going where each mesh entity provides a POTS bridge for calls local to their calling area, allowing for "free" long distance calls and connectivity to the POTS world.
It's not clear how you'd enable bridging POTS to VoIP; perhaps a calling-card type setup where you would call a local access number that would round-robin try various local mesh POTS bridges that would route calls to the respective VoIP termination point.
The whole thing needs most everyone to provide POTS bridging capability to their system. However, routing inbound calls to VoIP nodes requires an identifier, and if you make a phone number the indentifier it might encourage membership in the mesh. Outbound VoIP to POTS wouldn't need a phone number, but you could increase the priority of them for those providing POTS bridging.
Isn't it "political" when the right-to-vote is denied those who've completed their sentences? That, due to the higher numbers of black Americans passing through the prison system - FAR more B.A. are being denied the right-to-vote?
Commit a felony, you lose the right to vote. This is neither new, nor a conspiracy to disenfranchise any population group in the US. Religious beliefs and political speech in the US aren't felonies. In China, they are crimes that can lead to long jail sentences and in some cases, execution (such as exposing government activity that would otherwise be open in the U.S.). Also, felons can petition to regain their civil rights once they've served their sentences. It's not an automatic lifetime loss.
I notice that you ignored the "slave labour" issue?
Prison industries in the US are very seldom competitors with private industry; government competition with private industry in for-profit business is usually illegal or very unpopular. In most places, prison industry either supports the prison population directly (laundry, food service, textiles, farming, equipment repair) or the government generally -- Minnesota's prison industry produces a lot of the furniture used in government offices, as well as the ubiquitous production of license plates.
It's primarily self-supporting industries to support the prison population itself or the government generally, not for the profit of private indivuduals or government bureaucrats. Furthermore, the industries provide often badly needed vocational education for inmates.
How many were incarcerated for belonging to a religion? For advocating a free and open government? For advocating Democracy?
It's a dubious argument that the incarceration of black men on drug and theft charges represents a political incarceration; these people weren't pursuing drugs or crime as a political statement.
The drug laws are broken, but that hardly means people incarcerated for them are political prisoners.
Secondly if they have to buy domains they need to pay for them - that leaves a physical paper trail to spammers, now legislation can help.
Sorry, but I have to hit the bullshit button. Legislation hasn't helped yet, and I'm not talking about CAN-SPAM or any of the other anti-bulk mail bills, but the existing laws dealing with all manner of fraud, FDA regulations and any of the other various and sundry state and federal laws regulating the almost-universally fraudulent commercial content of spam.
You're suffering from the same delusion that many people, myself included, often suffer from -- "Can't we pass a *law*"? -- when there are many good laws already on the books that better deal with the problem in general.
I'd suggest a RICO investigation into some of the top-level spammers, their clients, and the people involved in the payments, the network access, and find out how dirty they really are. I don't know, but I suspect, that most of these people know they're involved in deeply fraudulent activity. A few racketeering convictions involving major ISPs, banks, spammers, and their business clients with some noisy investigation of other spammers could have a *real* impact -- squeezing the spammers out of ISP suppliers and banking services they literally can't do business without.
My suggestion is LCD RPTV. I have a 42" Sony Grand Wega III LCD, which I chose after careful reading of AVSForum and a lot of time in the showroom.
The DLPs looked OK, but their standard-def (SD) picture was really rough, and overall there was something kind of hard-edged about the picture; it looked as if it had been through too much digital processing.
The Sony LCD appeared to have a smoother, more film-like appearance, and much better SD picture quality.
Much of what I still watch is in SD, so SD PQ was important. They were both stunning with DVDs and HD content.
After 8 months with my Sony, the only real complaint I have is what I call "black crush" -- all black is pretty good, but there's not enough variation in near-blacks, and shadowy or night scenes can lose detail. It's less apparent to not apparent on HD broadcasts and DVDs.
No thinking person denies there are problems with the US system of government, it's current government, and many of the social, political and economic systems we have here.
However, we all know it. We talk about it constantly. We publish newspapers, magazines, and TV shows that display content critical of the government. We protest, rally, demonstrate. We lampoon our past and present leaders, demand (and often get!) changes in leadership and policy.
By and large, we don't kill our own people for it. We don't run slave labor camps, populated by people whose opinion on political matters differs from that of the government.
The Chinese do. China is a police state, run by dictators. It's not a democracy. There is no freedom of expression. Don't confuse the limited expression of economic capitalism in China with individual liberty.
Is the US system perfect? Hell no! Would you trade your life here for a life in China? I wouldn't.