So I followed the link, and they won't even tell me where their stores are without which I register for their website. What the heck is up with *that*?
And their front page consists of "Flash detection in progress" with nary an alternative for us Lynx users.
The amusement value for these would be better if they had more variety in diseases, but still, the Maladies selection isn't bad for gifts. A shame they don't come individually; I can think of a lot of people I could give ulcers to, but not too many I'd want to give Kissing Disease to...
I think I've mentioned this before, but I used to work at a bank. First floor of downtown HQ was the main branch which didn't open until some time after 8. So as we're all walking across from the parking garage, someone comes up, discovers the drive-through is closed and the ATM is down, and asks J. Random Passerby if she works there, and on getting a mumbled affirmative, shoves an envelope full of cash at her with a frantic request to deposit it when the branch opens thanks bye I'm late for work.
The poor randomly selected clerical worker was panicked because she was sure she was somehow being set up... that the envelope was short and she'd be accused of it, or whatever.
People are trusting.
On the other hand, their trust is not actually misplaced all that often.
Not to pick nits, but there are *some* legal consequences. You might lose the option to sue for certain kinds of damages (the name of which escapes me at the moment) in future cases. But you never lose the ability to tell infringers "Cut it out."
I'm guessing that I can take the number off the front of the lock and have WalMart cut me a new Chicago Lock key. (The original plan was to take the lock with us when doing so.) But yeah, yanking the lock is our next option. We just haven't gotten around to doing anything with it, though I'll have to soon. ("Drill it out" was the term used, so if it comes to that I'll try the sheetmetal screw option instead.) We don't really need the 95 licenses (they came with the donated computers, but they're all going to either be cannibalized or Debianized), but I'm gonna want the stapler, Post-Its, and other things in that cabinet...
Actually, sometimes you do need to crack its protection to get it to run on a PC: when you're reinstalling, and someone has pushed the cotton-pickin' lock button on the file cabinet nobody has a key to, and the licenses (and magic code numbers) are locked inside.
(It wasn't worth getting a locksmith at the moment, since it was a machine ultimately destined for a Linux installation, especially since the person who probably pushed the lock button was the three-year-old for whom I was going to fire up the machine temporarily so he could play pbskids.org Flash games rather than get into trouble doing things like, say, pushing buttons on file cabinets...)
This statement makes it seem that we overwork so that we can have an abundance of material wealth. Sorry, wrong. Maybe I'm alone in this but I work my ass off just to make ends meet.
I don't think you're alone in it, but I don't think you're the target audience.
When we decided to have kids (or, as it turned out, "a kid" and stop there) we looked at our lives. My husband and I are both geeks (he's a Unix sysadmin, I an AS/400 sysadmin/developer, both with a side of Perl), both making pretty fair money (for flyover country, anyhow), and we didn't want our kid(s) raised by daycare.
So we sat down and looked at our budget, and figured out just how much money we were spending just to buy our time back... paying for everything from restaurant meals to lawnmowing. And we realized that if we stopped doing all that, we could cut our household income in half and it wouldn't lower our standard of living.
And so I quit. Now, it means I have to do a lot of housework and other "manual labor" instead of playing with "big iron" all day. But, you know, I still get to play with Perl and do the *fun* stuff that I want to do (and, obviously, read Slashdot in the middle of the day, just like I always did), and take on the occasional contract job to keep my resume fresh.
But I'm digressing: it's the folks that *don't* take that road that are dragging you and everybody else along into this work-and-consume cycle... there are kids in my son's playgroup who are playing soccer already. They're getting pushed into organized sports when they turn THREE. It's a nightmare trying to schedule something with parents of older kids... they're rushing from practice to game to tournament, and kids are going to out-of-town and out-of-state tournaments in freakin' ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. Grabbing fast-food in the drive-through, and working overtime at two jobs to pay for the health club membership they don't have time to use, and so forth and so on.
It's nuts. Maybe we're atypical, but I think we're better off now.
I wondered that this weekend... I looked at some of the subject lines in my spambox, and realized I'd gotten the first green card spam I'd seen in years.
Then I'd sit in the back of my car with a good book or a tv and barely notice that I had a commute.
We have a pretty inadequate bus system (so no one rides it, so there's no money to make an adequate one, and round and round it goes), so only once did I have a job where I could ride it. But it sure was nice while it lasted; I got a fair amount of reading done.
Of course, in theory the buses had to stop for things like red lights. They pretty much ignore speed limits, though. And petty nuisances like snow and street flooding. ("I think our wake just washed a Festiva into the ditch. Should we tell the driver?")
Re:NZ did a variant that tasted like this a year a
on
Skittlebrau
·
· Score: 1
beer is meant to have a bitterness to it. Deal with it, or drink something else.
Pick up, and as soon as they go into their pitch, put the phone down on the counter, but don't hang up.
I used to hand the phone to my toddler, before he started speaking clearly. I had telemarketers trying out Spanish, SPEAK ING VER Y LOUD LY AND SLOW LY, and all sorts of other fun things like that.
Then the state started their own DNC list, and I don't get those calls anymore.
So why doesn't somebody *set up* a blatantly ridiculous DMCA lawsuit? You'd have to pay two sets of lawyers, sure, but you could pick your own example.
I've got the same problem. I've been answering the phone in the church office for a few months now, and I get probably one call a day from a phone company. And I'm only there for two or three hours.
I tell them "No, we run DSL on that line, and we've got a one-year contract with our Internet service provider," and that pretty much takes care of it. They don't ask when the contract will be up, or whether the ISP cares who runs the voice service.
The internet used to be a collaborative thing. Now it is consumption only.
The staff of the Phoenyx would like to respectfully disagree.
Granted, it's special-interest, but it's also a holdout of really, truly free. Not ad-supported. Not even donation-supported (though we get the odd non-cash present here and there).
(It's also theoretically open-source, though at the moment the software is in transition and I don't actually have the source packaged up conveniently enough to give out. I'm in the process of changing that.)
Seconded... we've had it statewide for some months now, and after the first couple of cases (a few Florida companies who Just Didn't Get It, as I recall) with hefty fines attached, the calls just stopped. I get the occasional nonprofit call, but there's a considerably more limited number of those, and when you hang up midway through the spiel they take the hint... you don't even have to take the time to request they remove you.
I have no connections with this project, and never claimed to have anything to do with it.
You probably should have said so up front, while you were pimping it.
It's amusing that you credit the assumption to an "age-old belief." If you'd come in here claiming relational databases were the Second Coming, I'd have given you the same response. And, you know, you *still* haven't given me any reason not to assume you're astroturfing. If you're not associated with this magic bullet, who *are* you?
Slashdot Mirror
(re BluDot)
So I followed the link, and they won't even tell me where their stores are without which I register for their website. What the heck is up with *that*?
And their front page consists of "Flash detection in progress" with nary an alternative for us Lynx users.
Ooookay.
The amusement value for these would be better if they had more variety in diseases, but still, the Maladies selection isn't bad for gifts. A shame they don't come individually; I can think of a lot of people I could give ulcers to, but not too many I'd want to give Kissing Disease to...
pantie-waste
I was going to call you on this, but then I realized that at least half of the misspelling works just as well as the "correct" version...
I think I've mentioned this before, but I used to work at a bank. First floor of downtown HQ was the main branch which didn't open until some time after 8. So as we're all walking across from the parking garage, someone comes up, discovers the drive-through is closed and the ATM is down, and asks J. Random Passerby if she works there, and on getting a mumbled affirmative, shoves an envelope full of cash at her with a frantic request to deposit it when the branch opens thanks bye I'm late for work.
The poor randomly selected clerical worker was panicked because she was sure she was somehow being set up... that the envelope was short and she'd be accused of it, or whatever.
People are trusting.
On the other hand, their trust is not actually misplaced all that often.
I gather the term "Kelly girl" is not familiar to most Slashdotters.
I feel old.
Not to pick nits, but there are *some* legal consequences. You might lose the option to sue for certain kinds of damages (the name of which escapes me at the moment) in future cases. But you never lose the ability to tell infringers "Cut it out."
Yeah, I was going to do that. But the paperclips are inside the file cabinet.
I'm guessing that I can take the number off the front of the lock and have WalMart cut me a new Chicago Lock key. (The original plan was to take the lock with us when doing so.) But yeah, yanking the lock is our next option. We just haven't gotten around to doing anything with it, though I'll have to soon. ("Drill it out" was the term used, so if it comes to that I'll try the sheetmetal screw option instead.) We don't really need the 95 licenses (they came with the donated computers, but they're all going to either be cannibalized or Debianized), but I'm gonna want the stapler, Post-Its, and other things in that cabinet...
Actually, sometimes you do need to crack its protection to get it to run on a PC: when you're reinstalling, and someone has pushed the cotton-pickin' lock button on the file cabinet nobody has a key to, and the licenses (and magic code numbers) are locked inside.
(It wasn't worth getting a locksmith at the moment, since it was a machine ultimately destined for a Linux installation, especially since the person who probably pushed the lock button was the three-year-old for whom I was going to fire up the machine temporarily so he could play pbskids.org Flash games rather than get into trouble doing things like, say, pushing buttons on file cabinets...)
Proxomitron will turn Flash (et al.) into links, so you can choose what you want to actually run.
This statement makes it seem that we overwork so that we can have an abundance of material wealth. Sorry, wrong. Maybe I'm alone in this but I work my ass off just to make ends meet.
I don't think you're alone in it, but I don't think you're the target audience.
When we decided to have kids (or, as it turned out, "a kid" and stop there) we looked at our lives. My husband and I are both geeks (he's a Unix sysadmin, I an AS/400 sysadmin/developer, both with a side of Perl), both making pretty fair money (for flyover country, anyhow), and we didn't want our kid(s) raised by daycare.
So we sat down and looked at our budget, and figured out just how much money we were spending just to buy our time back... paying for everything from restaurant meals to lawnmowing. And we realized that if we stopped doing all that, we could cut our household income in half and it wouldn't lower our standard of living.
And so I quit. Now, it means I have to do a lot of housework and other "manual labor" instead of playing with "big iron" all day. But, you know, I still get to play with Perl and do the *fun* stuff that I want to do (and, obviously, read Slashdot in the middle of the day, just like I always did), and take on the occasional contract job to keep my resume fresh.
But I'm digressing: it's the folks that *don't* take that road that are dragging you and everybody else along into this work-and-consume cycle... there are kids in my son's playgroup who are playing soccer already. They're getting pushed into organized sports when they turn THREE. It's a nightmare trying to schedule something with parents of older kids... they're rushing from practice to game to tournament, and kids are going to out-of-town and out-of-state tournaments in freakin' ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. Grabbing fast-food in the drive-through, and working overtime at two jobs to pay for the health club membership they don't have time to use, and so forth and so on.
It's nuts. Maybe we're atypical, but I think we're better off now.
Whatever happened to Canter and Siegel?
I wondered that this weekend... I looked at some of the subject lines in my spambox, and realized I'd gotten the first green card spam I'd seen in years.
Then I'd sit in the back of my car with a good book or a tv and barely notice that I had a commute.
We have a pretty inadequate bus system (so no one rides it, so there's no money to make an adequate one, and round and round it goes), so only once did I have a job where I could ride it. But it sure was nice while it lasted; I got a fair amount of reading done.
Of course, in theory the buses had to stop for things like red lights. They pretty much ignore speed limits, though. And petty nuisances like snow and street flooding. ("I think our wake just washed a Festiva into the ditch. Should we tell the driver?")
beer is meant to have a bitterness to it. Deal with it, or drink something else.
Like cider. Cider's good. Really good.
Pick up, and as soon as they go into their pitch, put the phone down on the counter, but don't hang up.
I used to hand the phone to my toddler, before he started speaking clearly. I had telemarketers trying out Spanish, SPEAK ING VER Y LOUD LY AND SLOW LY, and all sorts of other fun things like that.
Then the state started their own DNC list, and I don't get those calls anymore.
IBM Model M keboard
Me too, though the "y" key works on mine.
a reference to a (rather stupid) russian folklore joke
Googling doesn't seem to dereference it for me. (Okay, it apparently *does* dereference it, but only in Russian.)
Transliterated, that'd be "Gvin & Pin," I think. Shouldn't it be the other way 'round, though?
So why doesn't somebody *set up* a blatantly ridiculous DMCA lawsuit? You'd have to pay two sets of lawyers, sure, but you could pick your own example.
It's not just sluggish, it just outright hands me an "Internal service error." Refresh fixes it.
Here, it's playing in a theater that serves burgers and beer. At tables. (In the balcony; there's standard seating below.)
Not that I like beer, or am likely to go to this showing.
I've got the same problem. I've been answering the phone in the church office for a few months now, and I get probably one call a day from a phone company. And I'm only there for two or three hours.
I tell them "No, we run DSL on that line, and we've got a one-year contract with our Internet service provider," and that pretty much takes care of it. They don't ask when the contract will be up, or whether the ISP cares who runs the voice service.
I suppose "businesses" can't opt in to the DNC.
The internet used to be a collaborative thing. Now it is consumption only.
The staff of the Phoenyx would like to respectfully disagree.
Granted, it's special-interest, but it's also a holdout of really, truly free. Not ad-supported. Not even donation-supported (though we get the odd non-cash present here and there).
(It's also theoretically open-source, though at the moment the software is in transition and I don't actually have the source packaged up conveniently enough to give out. I'm in the process of changing that.)
Seconded... we've had it statewide for some months now, and after the first couple of cases (a few Florida companies who Just Didn't Get It, as I recall) with hefty fines attached, the calls just stopped. I get the occasional nonprofit call, but there's a considerably more limited number of those, and when you hang up midway through the spiel they take the hint... you don't even have to take the time to request they remove you.
I have no connections with this project, and never claimed to have anything to do with it.
You probably should have said so up front, while you were pimping it.
It's amusing that you credit the assumption to an "age-old belief." If you'd come in here claiming relational databases were the Second Coming, I'd have given you the same response. And, you know, you *still* haven't given me any reason not to assume you're astroturfing. If you're not associated with this magic bullet, who *are* you?