then there's mailing lists operated by nonprofit orgs, charities, etc.
Speaking as one such (we're not an IRS-endorsed nonprofit, we just don't charge anything *or* serve ads), I have to say... at this point, charging for email isn't going to make a difference for us. We're already looking for alternative methods of serving our content... e-postage isn't going to ruin things any *more* than spam already has.
The Phoenyx spends a great deal of "staff" time and server horsepower (successfully) trying to keep spam off the mailing lists, but it's reaching the point where it's a losing fight... we have no time to add features, etc. because we're constantly tweaking settings to achieve that balance between making administration and usage easy for our users, detecting spam, not getting caught in users' spamfilters, and staying off blacklists (we were on Spamcop's blacklist a few hours yesterday despite all that).
So we're basically giving up. The Phoenyx has served email in one form or another since 1986, and we're not going to stop just yet... but we're going to offer all the alternatives we can (for the same content): a private NNTP server, a web forum (and despite being here, I despise web forums), and so on.
I predict that within a year, we'll have no email subscribers left. Definitely none among nontechnical folks.
Of course, that just means the fight will turn to trying to block web forum spammers, but it's easier to set up authentication on web forums, at least.
Ours sits on the south side of the house (of course) under the overhang of the roof, where the weird additions (it's a 90-year-old house that's had four major additions put on) form a sort of alcove.
So it's about as sheltered as it can get, short of putting it inside pointing out a window (which I've heard of). We can get rain fade when the rain's off to the south of us somewhere, despite getting really clear signals most of the time.
I should, too, point out that we've got a pretty old dish. Newer ones don't seem to suffer from this even that much and, like I said, a 24"-ish dish, unprotected and from the same era, doesn't have the problem at all.
It makes sense to go to a larger dish in many cases
Yup. If we were as serious about TV-watching as the friend was, we'd probably have the larger dish (and double-barreled receiver too). Of course, wind is a factor here in the Land of the South Wind, so the larger dish picks up more wind wobble - ours is on a 6' pole set in a planter full of Quik-Rete, and swayed surprisingly little (being set in a sheltered location helps), but if we had the bigger dish we might have had to go to something with even more stability.
You will lose the signal when it rains hard. I live in Texas, the land of flash floods, and the most I've lost my signal for is an hour.
We used to lose the signal for a couple of hours at a time... in Kansas, so I imagine we're pointing at the same sat. (We might still do so, if we were actually using the service.)
We have the standard size dish, though (18"?). A friend bought the next size up (24"?), and never lost signal.
Uhh, I think that's why the bottom of the soda can is concave, rather than convex. If it gets too much pressure, it can pop out.
Evidently that doesn't always work; a friend of mine was muttering imprecations about her son after she had to take the ice maker out (the in-the-door sort) and clean all the frozen pop out of it after the son put a can not just in the freezer, but in amongst the ice.
Or maybe he was trying to turn the fridge into an Icee machine; he wasn't around for us to check.
Well, there's that (though my son doesn't particularly like it either). On the other hand, there's something to be said for letting your kid build up an immunity to the "buy tie-ins" pressure early. Means you have to not give in to it, of course. And that's tempting, as a parent. (And hard, when your friends and in-laws don't cooperate.)
I wouldn't be surprised if kids knew the name Pixar anyway
I'm (reasonably) sure he doesn't know the name, but my three-year-old certainly recognizes Luxor Jr. hopping out during the credits, and has made the connection between Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo as a result. So yeah, I'd expect kids old enough to read probably know the name.
(Then again, my son's the offspring of two geeks, so he may have gotten the reading-the-credits gene a little stronger than the average...)
Mod me redundant because I say this *every* time somebody whines about this, but:
I don't use AOL, but if MY ISP decided that I could no longer use my personal email address while I was at work (or at an internet cafe, or whatever), I'd be pretty pissed.
So you do what you're already supposed to do in this situation, and set the From line to your personal email address, and the SENDER line to wherever you really are. Mailing lists do this all the time.
Well...maybe 'not' because the vast majority of first-world nations have a geography that is excellent suited for agriculture, and have huge natural resources (more so then most european countries, anyway).
Right. And if you're going to extend the author's analogy to nations instead of just individuals, you can also consider those "abilities." You know... the "ability to more easily conduct agriculture" and things like that.
No, if we would be honest with ourselves, it would be rather clear what made the diference: our exploitation of those less powerfull nations.
Which comes down to the "ability" to exploit those nations.
Now, it's entirely possible the original author *didn't* mean anything so broad by "ability." But considering that you're trying to argue that he's wrong based on extending to nations what he only said (in the interview, anyhow) about individuals, the least you can do is give him the benefit of the doubt.
You just know you worked for a front company for a cocaine distrubutor don't you?
We always figured that, yeah. Though how they worked that in between all the *other* shady-to-blatantly-illegal things they were doing, I'll never know.
Though one of our (American) international-sales people was fond of remarking "I don't have any trouble at all shipping these packets of white powder" (powdered milk, part of survival kits on bush planes) "*to* South America, but if *they* start shipping it *back,* I'm quitting!"
Inevitably, one of the shipments got damaged in transit, and our shipping guys took great pleasure in putting the returned package - strewn with white powder from the damaged packets - on her desk.
And we did have one buyer re-order an entire $100K shipment, specifying that this time it needed to be shipped on a plane "with no one else's shipments on it" because the previous shipment (and the plane, and any other shipments on it) was sitting in impound on a drugs charge somewhere.
Not in the US, no no no. The INS was one of our biggest customers, and got deep discounts. And I know (because I had payroll system access, and more importantly accounts-payable access) that most of our employees were on student visas or no visas at all, and we never got raided, despite the number of disgruntled employees who doubtless turned them in. (Or maybe they were all like me, and figured it was pointless, I dunno.)
I require music to maintain any semblance of productivity. What is interesting is that people think "Wow, she has headphones on, so I can say whatever and she doesn't know."
Many, many years ago, I worked in an export place owned by an Argentinian woman. Aside from us token gringos, the place was all South and Central Americans, as were the reps who occasionally visited from our customers.
Once I was sitting at the receptionist's desk (my office was right next door, so I usually filled in for her on breaks, etc. since there was a terminal on her desk and we rarely got walk-ins anyway) and the company owner and one such rep were standing in the lobby chatting away. As had most of the other norteamericanos, I'd picked up enough Spanish to understand it provided I listened closely enough. I was keying away at a program and not really listening when the customer rep suddenly dropped his voice and said something. That, of course, got me interested enough to start listening... sadly, all I got was the boss saying "Don't worry, she doesn't speak Spanish," before they went upstairs.
I was tempted to say "No, but I do *understand* it," just to see the reaction...
It's a heck of a business model. They spider my sites, eating bandwidth without offering any benefit to the site owners (trivial, until you have a jillion *other* companies doing it too, some of whom don't respect robots.txt to leave graphics and/or dynamic content alone), and they get universities to pay them to increase their database.
Umm. SpamAssassin isn't Bayesian, it's rule-based. Someone needs better research
*Someone* does, but not the parent to this. SA *does* "incorporate Bayesian analysis techniques," and some of its rules are about handling the results. You can score those rules to 0 for non-Bayesian filtering, or score everything else to 0 for pure Bayesian.
but in most of North America (as long as you're not right downhill from a big city) the ground water is potable as it stands
I'd advise you to Google for "beaver fever" but you probably wouldn't get the result I'm thinking of (SafeSearch probably won't let you search at all...) And darned if I can remember the formal name for it. Somebody else remember? Anybody? Bueller?
If money is an issue, and you do want to finish a degree, try to land a good full-time job
That's my plan. My husband is presently going through a degree completion paid by his employer (a second bachelor's), and when he's done and our son starts school, I'm going back somewhere that'll pay for *my* degree completion.
Sadly, the only schools that offer that are private, and pricey. But nobody local offers a CS/Engineering degree like what I started, so I'd either have to switch to a non-engineering degree and lose all my engineering credit hours, or switch to one of the engineering degrees that *are* offered (likely EE) and lose all my CS credit hours plus end up with a degree that's fairly unrelated to the sort of programming I ended up doing. Either way, I'm looking at about four more years if I go back part time. Bah.
Fortunately, there are plenty of employers round yar that'll pay for the degree completion programs.
While it may be true that some people don't learn many applied skills in college, many companies simply won't take a chance on a non-college graduate, college dropout, or someone who got straight D's.
Let me add to this by pointing out that I have about three-quarters of a bachelor's, and it didn't impair me in any technical job... in fact, I quit because I figured I'd do better in two years of job advancement than two more years of college.
That said, even having done that during the boom time, I've run into things that have made me want to go back for that magic piece of paper: if you get into management (don't laugh... it happens to the best of us) it really confuses the bureaucracy if you don't have a degree. Like when I worked for the bank, and was scheduled to be made a vice president (which sounds nifty unless you're familiar with banking, in which case you realize VP is equal to "anyone other than a teller who's been here six months or longer") until I made the mistake of correcting someone who said I had an engineering degree. Of course, the sole benefit of being a VP was simply that you got to park on the deck instead of in the lot across the street. (Well, and after ten years you got a company car to put in that parking spot.)
I ended up trading the potiential VPness for SAHMhood, thereby averting a great deal of handwringing and loophole-hunting in HR. It was quite enlightened for a bank (one of the interview questions was "Rubber bands: office supply or weapon?") but, in the end, it *was* still a bank.
A trivial thing to get a college degree for, but enough of those events add up, and then I have to wonder about the ones I don't know about... missed promotions and what-have-you. If I wanted to back into the workforce in management, I'd definitely be finishing my degree first, because it's almost embarrassing explaining why I dropped out because that is Just Not Done Anymore. (Fortunately, I'm *not* going back into management... I have enough people calling me up asking when I'm going to be available again that I'll be able to stay in tech. Of course, most of that's RPG II/III/IV work, so maybe the management path isn't so bad after all...)
I have a hard time seeing how [telling other kids Santa Claus is just pretend] could really be a bad thing.
You'll understand if you ever become a parent. If it's the parent's decision to play the Santa Claus game, it should also be the parent's decision when to stop. And how, too... other kids tend to be, shall we say, less than sensitive about handling the telling.
Is it helping your children telling them there is a tooth fairy, Santa Claus, etc.?
Got a three-and-a-half-year-old, and we're going through that. On the one hand, you don't want him to be the one going around telling other kids Santa Claus is just pretend. On the other hand... you feel the idiot lying to your kid.
He's pretty much picked up on that, and seems comfortable with the compromise that you're supposed to pretend Santa Claus is real. Seems to be a win all around... he enjoys the game, doesn't spoil it for anybody else (including grandparents), and we don't have to go through the whole betrayal-of-trust thing.
Or so we hope. Because, as the author said, it *is* fun to play dress-up with their minds...
fun of playing with your CC company disputing the transactions
In my experience (mostly secondhand), disputing the transactions is ridiculously easy (provided you have a good credit rating and history of paying on time)... the credit card company just eats the charges and goes on its merry way, and doesn't even make a significant effort to find the perps.
This is not especially comforting, being that if this is happening with any sort of frequency, you know the company's not going to say, "Well, we'll just have to take it out of the CEO's salary"... it's coming right back around in fees and interest rates.
So even when it's easy, you don't get to put away the Tums, because you get to think about how you're ultimately paying bits and pieces of a *lot* of these sorts of incidents, even when they "forgive" all the charges (including the $50 liability, too... after all, if their customer has to pay any VISIBLE charges, they're liable to actually rock the boat about it).
Slashdot Mirror
then there's mailing lists operated by nonprofit orgs, charities, etc.
Speaking as one such (we're not an IRS-endorsed nonprofit, we just don't charge anything *or* serve ads), I have to say... at this point, charging for email isn't going to make a difference for us. We're already looking for alternative methods of serving our content... e-postage isn't going to ruin things any *more* than spam already has.
The Phoenyx spends a great deal of "staff" time and server horsepower (successfully) trying to keep spam off the mailing lists, but it's reaching the point where it's a losing fight... we have no time to add features, etc. because we're constantly tweaking settings to achieve that balance between making administration and usage easy for our users, detecting spam, not getting caught in users' spamfilters, and staying off blacklists (we were on Spamcop's blacklist a few hours yesterday despite all that).
So we're basically giving up. The Phoenyx has served email in one form or another since 1986, and we're not going to stop just yet... but we're going to offer all the alternatives we can (for the same content): a private NNTP server, a web forum (and despite being here, I despise web forums), and so on.
I predict that within a year, we'll have no email subscribers left. Definitely none among nontechnical folks.
Of course, that just means the fight will turn to trying to block web forum spammers, but it's easier to set up authentication on web forums, at least.
If you cover your dish you won't lose signal.
Ours sits on the south side of the house (of course) under the overhang of the roof, where the weird additions (it's a 90-year-old house that's had four major additions put on) form a sort of alcove.
So it's about as sheltered as it can get, short of putting it inside pointing out a window (which I've heard of). We can get rain fade when the rain's off to the south of us somewhere, despite getting really clear signals most of the time.
I should, too, point out that we've got a pretty old dish. Newer ones don't seem to suffer from this even that much and, like I said, a 24"-ish dish, unprotected and from the same era, doesn't have the problem at all.
It makes sense to go to a larger dish in many cases
Yup. If we were as serious about TV-watching as the friend was, we'd probably have the larger dish (and double-barreled receiver too). Of course, wind is a factor here in the Land of the South Wind, so the larger dish picks up more wind wobble - ours is on a 6' pole set in a planter full of Quik-Rete, and swayed surprisingly little (being set in a sheltered location helps), but if we had the bigger dish we might have had to go to something with even more stability.
Nowadays, we just have Netflix.
You will lose the signal when it rains hard. I live in Texas, the land of flash floods, and the most I've lost my signal for is an hour.
We used to lose the signal for a couple of hours at a time... in Kansas, so I imagine we're pointing at the same sat. (We might still do so, if we were actually using the service.)
We have the standard size dish, though (18"?). A friend bought the next size up (24"?), and never lost signal.
Uhh, I think that's why the bottom of the soda can is concave, rather than convex. If it gets too much pressure, it can pop out.
Evidently that doesn't always work; a friend of mine was muttering imprecations about her son after she had to take the ice maker out (the in-the-door sort) and clean all the frozen pop out of it after the son put a can not just in the freezer, but in amongst the ice.
Or maybe he was trying to turn the fridge into an Icee machine; he wasn't around for us to check.
Well, there's that (though my son doesn't particularly like it either). On the other hand, there's something to be said for letting your kid build up an immunity to the "buy tie-ins" pressure early. Means you have to not give in to it, of course. And that's tempting, as a parent. (And hard, when your friends and in-laws don't cooperate.)
I wouldn't be surprised if kids knew the name Pixar anyway
I'm (reasonably) sure he doesn't know the name, but my three-year-old certainly recognizes Luxor Jr. hopping out during the credits, and has made the connection between Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo as a result. So yeah, I'd expect kids old enough to read probably know the name.
(Then again, my son's the offspring of two geeks, so he may have gotten the reading-the-credits gene a little stronger than the average...)
but you don't let he watch a show that helps her learn.
Speaking as the parent of a three-year-old also, I'm not especially impressed with the "learning" they supposedly do on Barney.
You're spoofing your "From:" address at the moment, and that's exactly what nobody should be allowed to do for any reason...
Yes, they absolutely should. But not without a valid Sender: address.
Mod me redundant because I say this *every* time somebody whines about this, but:
I don't use AOL, but if MY ISP decided that I could no longer use my personal email address while I was at work (or at an internet cafe, or whatever), I'd be pretty pissed.
So you do what you're already supposed to do in this situation, and set the From line to your personal email address, and the SENDER line to wherever you really are. Mailing lists do this all the time.
Well...maybe 'not' because the vast majority of first-world nations have a geography that is excellent suited for agriculture, and have huge natural resources (more so then most european countries, anyway).
Right. And if you're going to extend the author's analogy to nations instead of just individuals, you can also consider those "abilities." You know... the "ability to more easily conduct agriculture" and things like that.
No, if we would be honest with ourselves, it would be rather clear what made the diference: our exploitation of those less powerfull nations.
Which comes down to the "ability" to exploit those nations.
Now, it's entirely possible the original author *didn't* mean anything so broad by "ability." But considering that you're trying to argue that he's wrong based on extending to nations what he only said (in the interview, anyhow) about individuals, the least you can do is give him the benefit of the doubt.
You just know you worked for a front company for a cocaine distrubutor don't you?
We always figured that, yeah. Though how they worked that in between all the *other* shady-to-blatantly-illegal things they were doing, I'll never know.
Though one of our (American) international-sales people was fond of remarking "I don't have any trouble at all shipping these packets of white powder" (powdered milk, part of survival kits on bush planes) "*to* South America, but if *they* start shipping it *back,* I'm quitting!"
Inevitably, one of the shipments got damaged in transit, and our shipping guys took great pleasure in putting the returned package - strewn with white powder from the damaged packets - on her desk.
And we did have one buyer re-order an entire $100K shipment, specifying that this time it needed to be shipped on a plane "with no one else's shipments on it" because the previous shipment (and the plane, and any other shipments on it) was sitting in impound on a drugs charge somewhere.
Not in the US, no no no. The INS was one of our biggest customers, and got deep discounts. And I know (because I had payroll system access, and more importantly accounts-payable access) that most of our employees were on student visas or no visas at all, and we never got raided, despite the number of disgruntled employees who doubtless turned them in. (Or maybe they were all like me, and figured it was pointless, I dunno.)
I require music to maintain any semblance of productivity. What is interesting is that people think "Wow, she has headphones on, so I can say whatever and she doesn't know."
Many, many years ago, I worked in an export place owned by an Argentinian woman. Aside from us token gringos, the place was all South and Central Americans, as were the reps who occasionally visited from our customers.
Once I was sitting at the receptionist's desk (my office was right next door, so I usually filled in for her on breaks, etc. since there was a terminal on her desk and we rarely got walk-ins anyway) and the company owner and one such rep were standing in the lobby chatting away. As had most of the other norteamericanos, I'd picked up enough Spanish to understand it provided I listened closely enough. I was keying away at a program and not really listening when the customer rep suddenly dropped his voice and said something. That, of course, got me interested enough to start listening... sadly, all I got was the boss saying "Don't worry, she doesn't speak Spanish," before they went upstairs.
I was tempted to say "No, but I do *understand* it," just to see the reaction...
It is oversimplistic in the same way communism is.
Well, no, not really. It's more "oversimplistic in the way a couple lines out of an interview are."
So the differences between incomes in the first world and the third world are dependent on differences in abilites??
"Abilities" at the scale of nations would have to include things like geography, natural resources, and so on. Why not?
It's a heck of a business model. They spider my sites, eating bandwidth without offering any benefit to the site owners (trivial, until you have a jillion *other* companies doing it too, some of whom don't respect robots.txt to leave graphics and/or dynamic content alone), and they get universities to pay them to increase their database.
Wish I'd thought of it.
Umm. SpamAssassin isn't Bayesian, it's rule-based. Someone needs better research
*Someone* does, but not the parent to this. SA *does* "incorporate Bayesian analysis techniques," and some of its rules are about handling the results. You can score those rules to 0 for non-Bayesian filtering, or score everything else to 0 for pure Bayesian.
And what happens when Server A sends to Alice at Server B. But Alice is really a redirector for Bob at Server C, so it forwards it on.
That's what the Sender field is for, and, when it's present, what the SPF and other critters should be validating against. And your whitelist, too.
My pack is heavy enough with food and shelter and extra clothes.
Which just makes you wonder how many people it took to carry the Prius...
but in most of
North America (as long as you're not right downhill from a big city) the
ground water is potable as it stands
I'd advise you to Google for "beaver fever" but you probably wouldn't get the result I'm thinking of (SafeSearch probably won't let you search at all...) And darned if I can remember the formal name for it. Somebody else remember? Anybody? Bueller?
If money is an issue, and you do want to finish a degree, try to land a good full-time job
That's my plan. My husband is presently going through a degree completion paid by his employer (a second bachelor's), and when he's done and our son starts school, I'm going back somewhere that'll pay for *my* degree completion.
Sadly, the only schools that offer that are private, and pricey. But nobody local offers a CS/Engineering degree like what I started, so I'd either have to switch to a non-engineering degree and lose all my engineering credit hours, or switch to one of the engineering degrees that *are* offered (likely EE) and lose all my CS credit hours plus end up with a degree that's fairly unrelated to the sort of programming I ended up doing. Either way, I'm looking at about four more years if I go back part time. Bah.
Fortunately, there are plenty of employers round yar that'll pay for the degree completion programs.
While it may be true that some people don't learn many applied skills in college, many companies simply won't take a chance on a non-college graduate, college dropout, or someone who got straight D's.
Let me add to this by pointing out that I have about three-quarters of a bachelor's, and it didn't impair me in any technical job... in fact, I quit because I figured I'd do better in two years of job advancement than two more years of college.
That said, even having done that during the boom time, I've run into things that have made me want to go back for that magic piece of paper: if you get into management (don't laugh... it happens to the best of us) it really confuses the bureaucracy if you don't have a degree. Like when I worked for the bank, and was scheduled to be made a vice president (which sounds nifty unless you're familiar with banking, in which case you realize VP is equal to "anyone other than a teller who's been here six months or longer") until I made the mistake of correcting someone who said I had an engineering degree. Of course, the sole benefit of being a VP was simply that you got to park on the deck instead of in the lot across the street. (Well, and after ten years you got a company car to put in that parking spot.)
I ended up trading the potiential VPness for SAHMhood, thereby averting a great deal of handwringing and loophole-hunting in HR. It was quite enlightened for a bank (one of the interview questions was "Rubber bands: office supply or weapon?") but, in the end, it *was* still a bank.
A trivial thing to get a college degree for, but enough of those events add up, and then I have to wonder about the ones I don't know about... missed promotions and what-have-you. If I wanted to back into the workforce in management, I'd definitely be finishing my degree first, because it's almost embarrassing explaining why I dropped out because that is Just Not Done Anymore. (Fortunately, I'm *not* going back into management... I have enough people calling me up asking when I'm going to be available again that I'll be able to stay in tech. Of course, most of that's RPG II/III/IV work, so maybe the management path isn't so bad after all...)
I have a hard time seeing how [telling other kids Santa Claus is just pretend] could really be a bad thing.
You'll understand if you ever become a parent. If it's the parent's decision to play the Santa Claus game, it should also be the parent's decision when to stop. And how, too... other kids tend to be, shall we say, less than sensitive about handling the telling.
Is it helping your children telling them there is a tooth fairy, Santa Claus, etc.?
Got a three-and-a-half-year-old, and we're going through that. On the one hand, you don't want him to be the one going around telling other kids Santa Claus is just pretend. On the other hand... you feel the idiot lying to your kid.
He's pretty much picked up on that, and seems comfortable with the compromise that you're supposed to pretend Santa Claus is real. Seems to be a win all around... he enjoys the game, doesn't spoil it for anybody else (including grandparents), and we don't have to go through the whole betrayal-of-trust thing.
Or so we hope. Because, as the author said, it *is* fun to play dress-up with their minds...
fun of playing with your CC company disputing the transactions
In my experience (mostly secondhand), disputing the transactions is ridiculously easy (provided you have a good credit rating and history of paying on time)... the credit card company just eats the charges and goes on its merry way, and doesn't even make a significant effort to find the perps.
This is not especially comforting, being that if this is happening with any sort of frequency, you know the company's not going to say, "Well, we'll just have to take it out of the CEO's salary"... it's coming right back around in fees and interest rates.
So even when it's easy, you don't get to put away the Tums, because you get to think about how you're ultimately paying bits and pieces of a *lot* of these sorts of incidents, even when they "forgive" all the charges (including the $50 liability, too... after all, if their customer has to pay any VISIBLE charges, they're liable to actually rock the boat about it).