The last time I went to see someone in the medical profession, they asked me for my social security number. In a friendly a voice possible, with a big smile on my face, I told them I prefer not to give it out and asked them if there was any other number they could use.
Took about 5 seconds, and they put something presumably random in.
I didn't have the same exact problem, but a couple of years ago, register.com started sending me emails telling me they were going to start auto-renewing a handful of domains I had transferred to godaddy.com a while back.
I sent them a few friendly emails telling them they didn't have those domains in their system anymore. They blew me off, and we went a few rounds of pointless email.
Finally, I sent them an email telling them I did not feel the matter was being resolved to my satisfaction, and I was going to have to discuss this with MasterCard and my attorney to see if there were any legal actions that might need to be taken.
Note, I didn't say I was going to sue them. I said I was going to look into the matter to see if there was any reason to do so. A threat of a threat, if you will.
I got a call the next morning, and everything was worked out to my satisfaction in about 5 minutes.
I was writing something about this earlier, and I couldn't find an actual source from where these memos came from. Then again, I'm quitting smoking and reducing caffeine, so my brain is pretty much toast right now on analytical situations.
But all of this came from a mailing list, if I recall correctly. To me, this implies that someone "defected" and as such might be willing to testify that, "Yes, these are the emails that I received", with enough proof that Diebold isn't willing to chance it.
Sort of. The thing is though, you have to put the word Scientology in the link. That way Google will increase the weight of associating the word Scientology with http://www.xenu.net/. I'm running that link on the bottom of about 2400 distinct pages. Hopefully that added to the weighting. It's also in every.sig of mine on slashdot as shown below.
Something I'm going to do is a little bit of googlebombing myself. I have about 2500 dynamically generated pages on my site, without ?x=3&y=4 query strings (yay mod_rewrite!) adding to the mess and google carefully picks them up regularly.
So, I'm going to add "In my opinion, <a href="http://www.xenu.net/">
Scientology
</a> is a cult you should avoid. Following the preceding link will help you learn more." at the bottom of each page. That should help a little bit. Maybe if enough people did that, the ranking would go up some?
From what I recall, and mind you, I've only seen Star Wars once when it was actually in the theatres, didn't Ben hand Luke his first lightsaber saying "This was your father's" followed by something like "You knew my father? Yes, he was a great Jedi Knight before Darth Vader killed him."
So... maybe during the movie, while Anakin is still a nice Jedi, he has a blue lightsaber. Then he goes bad, tosses his light saber to Ben, runs off with the princess and is forced to build a new one, thus the red one.
Of course, the question comes up now, if the good guys have blue, and the bad guys have red, then where the hell does Luke stand with a green one?
I'm very surprised at slashdot, slashdot should be accused of treason right now.
U.S. Constitution
Article III
Section 3
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. (Emphasis mine)
The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
We have this thing called the Constitution. You may have heard about it. You know, the instruction manual?
Right now, we're on a cusp. We do need to find the enemies of our country that have attacked us in such a cowardly manner and make then pay the necessary price. But we need to maintain the freedoms that make the country what it is. Otherwise, when this is all said and done, we could easily end up as a police state. I have no desire to live in such a place, so I will be doing what I can within the existing process to ensure that our rights are secured.
After a discussion with some co-workers, we agreed that the towers should be re-built, and in the some location as the former towers. Not only as a memorial to those who died, but also as a sign of this country's strength.
Personally, I've been thinking that it might be more appropriate to level the blocks completely and have everyone's names who dies in this engraved in steel plates, along the lines of the Vietnam Wall.
I can see the rebuilding of the towers being a display of strength. I think it might be more appropriate to have a memorial to remind us that bad things can happen.
I am the owner of the following domains, and I am requesting that TopText, or any product using the same or similar technology, present or future, created or licensed by your company, not interact with them in any form, shape, or manner. Please let me know when your exclusion database has been updated to reflect this.
[domain list snip]
Hopefully this will cover me in the event they go and change the name to "EyeballGrabber" or somesuch.
The links aren't yellow, so backgrounds won't work. It's a green stripe surrounded by two orange stripes, so even making a background gif/png with the same striping will theoretically only visually eliminate 50% of the links. Also, the resulting "yellow" is so ugly that I'd puke if I saw a web site with that background (just a subjective observation on the last.)
The Meta tag works. I placed a keyword (sports) on a domain I own, saw the underline pop up, updated the source code, refreshed the cache, and it didn't appear. The meta tag is: <META NAME="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" CONTENT="TRUE"> For those not sure about this, this needs to go somewhere between<HEAD></HEAD> in your HTML.
An interesting note. I own a com/net/org set of a domain. The TopText links do not appear on the.org, but will show up on.net and.com. I don't own any domains that fall under other TLDs. I would be interested in hearing other's results on this.
The keywords and URLs are stored on your system, it seems. It looks like they're enciphered, and it looks to my untrained eye that it's something like a cycling caesar.
This means the USER_AGENT string in your browser stays the same, so you can't sniff them on their way in and block/redirect them.
This also means that blocking ezula.com from coming into your site won't really do anything, since it doesn't look like they actually do so, at least by my logs.
That's pretty much all I have to contribute at this time. Any more info would be gladly received via this page.
A lot of people don't seem to realize that a small annoyance for them (ads) might be the lifeblood of a struggling internet website.
I'll concede that. What I'd like to make certain you know though is that I am under no obligation to ensure that they make a profit, let alone basic costs.
I have 3 domains that I actually do things with, plus 22 others that I use for mailing lists or other purposes that I don't need to get into. This year, for 25 domain transfers alone, it cost me $350. I own copies of Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and a whole bunch of other web/graphic tools. Total cost: somewhere in the neighborhood of $3000. Never mind the costs of computers involved. How many ads do I have? None. I've sold one cafepress.com T-shirt as a lark, and a couple of email address forwarders when people ask for one. Total profit: $26.00
If the website wants to live, one of two conditions have to be met.
The web site has to have a product that can be sold. I've purchased books, software, hardware, porn, domains, email addresses, food items, video tapes, and who knows what else online.
The site owner has to want to produce the information on the site. Simple as that. My sites cost me money to setup, and money to keep online, and $26.00 is not enough to fund any of it. So in order to keep things going, I work and pay to keep things running.
Now if a site wants to have ads, they're more than welcome to run them, and I'm more than welcome to run WebWasher and run NoPop. If the site goes away, so be it. If they want to charge for access to their site, if it's worth it, I'll pay. If not, I'll go somewhere else or do without.
but by blocking popups, you're hurting the bottom line of people just like us.
I'm not hurting your bottom line if you actually have something that's worth money to me. I hate ads. Ads are the "gateway drug" to "consume, reproduce, consume some more, die".
Dump NS and go for opensrs I have never had any problems with OpenSRS. I am in full control, allowed batch transfers, awesome admin and I can code it anyway I want.
I'm all for dumping NS and getting another registrar, including an OpenSRS affiliate, but make sure you do your research first.
Some OpenSRS affiliates latch themselves on to your domain as Admin Contact, or lock you partly or even completely from modifying your domain information. One case in point is www.domainsdoneright.com which won't let you modify anything in your domain directly through the OpenSRS management web interface unless you ask them to. Even so, they're still the admin contact, and Ghu help you if you have to make many changes upon multiple domains. It's a one at a time thing.
Now, not all OpenSRS affiliates are like this. I'm sure there are many out there that give you full access to your domain, so if you need to change the billing contact info, you can modify it once and apply the change to all your domains. The one I was using dropped out, so I can't recommend them to you.
I'm using another registrar altogether (www.itsyourdomain.com), but it's what works for me. It may not work for you.
The key thing here is to ask your potential registrar what capabilities your given in managing your domain as well as what restrictions they place on you.
Well, my whole take on the matter is, the less people are willing to shell out, the faster everyone will leave the Internet, and in some ways, that's a good thing.
I'm going to go "old fogey" on you for a moment but even as recent as 1994, the Net was still a pretty cool place, with not a lot of commercial content. Granted, that was because HTTP was still a new protocol, and if you really needed to find anything, you waded through Veronica or Archie searches on Gopher or FTP. At the same time though, if I brought a HD at a flea market without documentation, I could ftp to seagate.com, and figure out if I needed to change the jumpers or not. If I wanted to chat with people, there was IRC, Usenet, and MU(SH|D)s, and email.
Granted, all of those are still there, and with the evolution of Windows, X Window Managers, and Mac OS, doing some of the stuff that could only be done on a 14.4 dial up into the university VAX was PAINFUL.
But with the Web, everything became GUI based. Try reading some sites in Lynx. Good luck. And with GUI, you've finally found a medium that Joe Six Pack can understand. Which, IMO, is what lead to "Punch the Monkey" banner ads, Internet Bingo, and various porn sites (not that I'm knocking porn sites, I have my own collection).
It's an elitist viewpoint, but the Net used to be interesting. Now it's entertaining, and there's nothing wrong with being entertained, but that's what TV and the rest of the "traditional media" is for. Once it stops being entertaining, Joe Six Pack will go back to watching Hee Haw reruns on his 3000 channel cable box.
And that's why I won't pay for Internet content. It'll make the "dot com" people and their potential customers go away, and the Net may go back to being more focused on knowledge rather than entertainment. Or at the very least, people who do the entertainment are doing it for the love of what they're doing, not the profit margin. Let's get the commoners and the businessmen out of here.
As I'm rereading/editing this, I realize that I may seem to be contradicting myself, since I used certain examples of how I used the Net in the past. However, Usenet taught me regex's for filtering purposes, and how the networks were actually connected. MUSHing started off as a playground for me, and then I actually figured out OOP from programming in the environment. There's not a whole lot you can pick up from http://www.sexybabes.com (made up URL) except maybe how to defy gravity with your breasts.:)
I don't know as if that'll hold water. Presumably, the MPAA could license CSS decryption tools to the RIAA and then the RIAA would just sit there and decrypt traffic.
All you're doing is adding a step to the process of them hunting people down.
I have. I am in the process of suing a former employer, and I still pick up contracts for work, get offered permanent positions.
The thing is, I don't volunteer that I'm suing my former employer because it's none of their business. When they ask why I left company X, I tell them why I left, and continue on with the interview.
2 years ago, someone found a link as listed in the previous message under OPLIN (Ohio Public Library Information Network) that took them offsite (http://www.sftoday.com/enn2/hscentral.htm) which is apparently a page that showcases high schools, teachers, etc.
This page hasn't been updated for 3 years.
This page is hosted by San Francisco Bay Interactive - About as far from Ohio as you can get and still be in the USA.
The main thing here is that yes the link labeled as Environment does take you to an adult themed site. (Different browsers took me to different pages) This is due to the following:
The link was to a page on the domain www.vcomm.net, which is no longer being used for whatever purpose it was back in 1997.
The domain is now owned by "Venus Communications" or such, which is
an adult themed company.
So yes, I'm sure that at one time, there was a series of links that could be followed from OPLIN that would take you to a porn site. After poking through the site long enough, I would say that link is no longer there. I eventually had to do a
Google search for "central high school oplin" to find out if Nathaniel was even on track. The thing is, this is old news.
So if you're outraged, as Nathaniel is, I would say that you should check your facts first, before reporting "news" that a) is no longer true, and b) has its facts not completely accurate.
The fact of the matter is that OPLIN linked to site A. Site A linked to site B. Site B had information on the environment at one time. Site B now contains adult themed material. I won't say porn because one browser opened up to an underwear site, and the underwear was men's briefs and bikini bottoms. Garish colors, but not pornographic. Either way, you have OPLIN -> Site A -> SiteB, rather then OPLIN -> Site B. I proclaim OPLIN innocent, and Nathaniel misrepresenting facts.
It's not steganography, and it's not even very clever, but a question arises. This is a gif. It's not text, and thus compiler readable. It's not anything that can be read immediately, so is this illegal?
Count me in. I'm all for grilling a little Bambi or Thumper. I'll even bring some potato salad.
If anyone's seriously interested, I'm willing to spend some time and contact people in KC or somewhere similarly central to host this.
Also, I've registered screwpeta.com which I'm willing to contribute for organizing the BBQ, as well as maybe rehosting the original peta.org pages. Someone would have to donate some colocation though.
While having X amount of/.'ers hit them with sugar and spice is not going to make them change their mind, (I'd love to be in the board meeting for that. "The people say they don't want our ads. Maybe we should close up shop." Yeah, right) but if we all tell them politely that we're not going to do business with their partners, and we're going to talk to our congress people about legislating them out of business, then they may start to figure out another way to blow their investor's money away.
Most of us here are geeks/nerds/whathaveyou, but those of us who are over 18 and in the US can vote. If you've registered to do so, then send a nice piece of email to your congress people and tell them you'd like your privacy protected on the Internet.
The "real world" is coming in after us, people. It's time we use the tools that are available to us to keep them where we want them. So we have to play with the politicos. But we have to play with them nice and professionally.
Use a spell checker. Clear your grammar with your English major/grad buddy. Remove those swear words. Don't be a jerk. They're not going to listen to you otherwise, and they'll do whatever they want with their business plans or introduced legislation, or God help us, voter initiatives.
Excessive Use of the <B> tag used in place of a Clue-by-Four unavailable via HTTP.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The last time I went to see someone in the medical profession, they asked me for my social security number. In a friendly a voice possible, with a big smile on my face, I told them I prefer not to give it out and asked them if there was any other number they could use.
Took about 5 seconds, and they put something presumably random in.
I didn't have the same exact problem, but a couple of years ago, register.com started sending me emails telling me they were going to start auto-renewing a handful of domains I had transferred to godaddy.com a while back.
I sent them a few friendly emails telling them they didn't have those domains in their system anymore. They blew me off, and we went a few rounds of pointless email.
Finally, I sent them an email telling them I did not feel the matter was being resolved to my satisfaction, and I was going to have to discuss this with MasterCard and my attorney to see if there were any legal actions that might need to be taken.
Note, I didn't say I was going to sue them. I said I was going to look into the matter to see if there was any reason to do so. A threat of a threat, if you will.
I got a call the next morning, and everything was worked out to my satisfaction in about 5 minutes.
I've been bitching at my Congress critters for almost 2 years now about this.
Here's my prediction from 2/1/2002.
I was writing something about this earlier, and I couldn't find an actual source from where these memos came from. Then again, I'm quitting smoking and reducing caffeine, so my brain is pretty much toast right now on analytical situations.
But all of this came from a mailing list, if I recall correctly. To me, this implies that someone "defected" and as such might be willing to testify that, "Yes, these are the emails that I received", with enough proof that Diebold isn't willing to chance it.
Sort of. The thing is though, you have to put the word Scientology in the link. That way Google will increase the weight of associating the word Scientology with http://www.xenu.net/. I'm running that link on the bottom of about 2400 distinct pages. Hopefully that added to the weighting. It's also in every .sig of mine on slashdot as shown below.
Use something like my new .sig anywhere you can, or look at the bottom of any of the pages at chaos.org.
Something I'm going to do is a little bit of googlebombing myself. I have about 2500 dynamically generated pages on my site, without ?x=3&y=4 query strings (yay mod_rewrite!) adding to the mess and google carefully picks them up regularly.
So, I'm going to add "In my opinion, <a href="http://www.xenu.net/"> Scientology </a> is a cult you should avoid. Following the preceding link will help you learn more." at the bottom of each page. That should help a little bit. Maybe if enough people did that, the ranking would go up some?
Foo.
Only the *large* version requires the pro version. The medium version works alright.
From what I recall, and mind you, I've only seen Star Wars once when it was actually in the theatres, didn't Ben hand Luke his first lightsaber saying "This was your father's" followed by something like "You knew my father? Yes, he was a great Jedi Knight before Darth Vader killed him."
So... maybe during the movie, while Anakin is still a nice Jedi, he has a blue lightsaber. Then he goes bad, tosses his light saber to Ben, runs off with the princess and is forced to build a new one, thus the red one.
Of course, the question comes up now, if the good guys have blue, and the bad guys have red, then where the hell does Luke stand with a green one?
Sayeth t0qer:
U.S. Constitution
Article III
Section 3
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. (Emphasis mine)
The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
We have this thing called the Constitution. You may have heard about it. You know, the instruction manual?
Right now, we're on a cusp. We do need to find the enemies of our country that have attacked us in such a cowardly manner and make then pay the necessary price. But we need to maintain the freedoms that make the country what it is. Otherwise, when this is all said and done, we could easily end up as a police state. I have no desire to live in such a place, so I will be doing what I can within the existing process to ensure that our rights are secured.
Personally, I've been thinking that it might be more appropriate to level the blocks completely and have everyone's names who dies in this engraved in steel plates, along the lines of the Vietnam Wall.
I can see the rebuilding of the towers being a display of strength. I think it might be more appropriate to have a memorial to remind us that bad things can happen.
Hello,
I am the owner of the following domains, and I am requesting that TopText, or any product using the same or similar technology, present or future, created or licensed by your company, not interact with them in any form, shape, or manner. Please let me know when your exclusion database has been updated to reflect this.
[domain list snip]
Hopefully this will cover me in the event they go and change the name to "EyeballGrabber" or somesuch.
<META NAME="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" CONTENT="TRUE">
For those not sure about this, this needs to go somewhere between<HEAD></HEAD> in your HTML.
That's pretty much all I have to contribute at this time. Any more info would be gladly received via this page.
I'll concede that. What I'd like to make certain you know though is that I am under no obligation to ensure that they make a profit, let alone basic costs.
I have 3 domains that I actually do things with, plus 22 others that I use for mailing lists or other purposes that I don't need to get into. This year, for 25 domain transfers alone, it cost me $350. I own copies of Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and a whole bunch of other web/graphic tools. Total cost: somewhere in the neighborhood of $3000. Never mind the costs of computers involved. How many ads do I have? None. I've sold one cafepress.com T-shirt as a lark, and a couple of email address forwarders when people ask for one. Total profit: $26.00
If the website wants to live, one of two conditions have to be met.
Now if a site wants to have ads, they're more than welcome to run them, and I'm more than welcome to run WebWasher and run NoPop. If the site goes away, so be it. If they want to charge for access to their site, if it's worth it, I'll pay. If not, I'll go somewhere else or do without.
I'm not hurting your bottom line if you actually have something that's worth money to me. I hate ads. Ads are the "gateway drug" to "consume, reproduce, consume some more, die".
I'm all for dumping NS and getting another registrar, including an OpenSRS affiliate, but make sure you do your research first.
Some OpenSRS affiliates latch themselves on to your domain as Admin Contact, or lock you partly or even completely from modifying your domain information. One case in point is www.domainsdoneright.com which won't let you modify anything in your domain directly through the OpenSRS management web interface unless you ask them to. Even so, they're still the admin contact, and Ghu help you if you have to make many changes upon multiple domains. It's a one at a time thing.
Now, not all OpenSRS affiliates are like this. I'm sure there are many out there that give you full access to your domain, so if you need to change the billing contact info, you can modify it once and apply the change to all your domains. The one I was using dropped out, so I can't recommend them to you.
I'm using another registrar altogether (www.itsyourdomain.com), but it's what works for me. It may not work for you.
The key thing here is to ask your potential registrar what capabilities your given in managing your domain as well as what restrictions they place on you.
Caveat Emptor.
Well, my whole take on the matter is, the less people are willing to shell out, the faster everyone will leave the Internet, and in some ways, that's a good thing.
I'm going to go "old fogey" on you for a moment but even as recent as 1994, the Net was still a pretty cool place, with not a lot of commercial content. Granted, that was because HTTP was still a new protocol, and if you really needed to find anything, you waded through Veronica or Archie searches on Gopher or FTP. At the same time though, if I brought a HD at a flea market without documentation, I could ftp to seagate.com, and figure out if I needed to change the jumpers or not. If I wanted to chat with people, there was IRC, Usenet, and MU(SH|D)s, and email.
Granted, all of those are still there, and with the evolution of Windows, X Window Managers, and Mac OS, doing some of the stuff that could only be done on a 14.4 dial up into the university VAX was PAINFUL.
But with the Web, everything became GUI based. Try reading some sites in Lynx. Good luck. And with GUI, you've finally found a medium that Joe Six Pack can understand. Which, IMO, is what lead to "Punch the Monkey" banner ads, Internet Bingo, and various porn sites (not that I'm knocking porn sites, I have my own collection).
It's an elitist viewpoint, but the Net used to be interesting. Now it's entertaining, and there's nothing wrong with being entertained, but that's what TV and the rest of the "traditional media" is for. Once it stops being entertaining, Joe Six Pack will go back to watching Hee Haw reruns on his 3000 channel cable box.
And that's why I won't pay for Internet content. It'll make the "dot com" people and their potential customers go away, and the Net may go back to being more focused on knowledge rather than entertainment. Or at the very least, people who do the entertainment are doing it for the love of what they're doing, not the profit margin. Let's get the commoners and the businessmen out of here.
As I'm rereading/editing this, I realize that I may seem to be contradicting myself, since I used certain examples of how I used the Net in the past. However, Usenet taught me regex's for filtering purposes, and how the networks were actually connected. MUSHing started off as a playground for me, and then I actually figured out OOP from programming in the environment. There's not a whole lot you can pick up from http://www.sexybabes.com (made up URL) except maybe how to defy gravity with your breasts. :)
I'm in the pro-Linux camp myself, but anyone who can't see that the parent poster has a valid point is full of themselves.
I don't know as if that'll hold water. Presumably, the MPAA could license CSS decryption tools to the RIAA and then the RIAA would just sit there and decrypt traffic.
All you're doing is adding a step to the process of them hunting people down.
Simple.
I have. I am in the process of suing a former employer, and I still pick up contracts for work, get offered permanent positions.
The thing is, I don't volunteer that I'm suing my former employer because it's none of their business. When they ask why I left company X, I tell them why I left, and continue on with the interview.
For those interested in the OLD incident this is referring to, I direct you to a mailing list digest that goes into this in more detail at: http://internet.ggu.edu/university_library/if/hyst eria.html.
In a nutshell:
2 years ago, someone found a link as listed in the previous message under OPLIN (Ohio Public Library Information Network) that took them offsite (http://www.sftoday.com/enn2/hscentral.htm) which is apparently a page that showcases high schools, teachers, etc.
So yes, I'm sure that at one time, there was a series of links that could be followed from OPLIN that would take you to a porn site. After poking through the site long enough, I would say that link is no longer there. I eventually had to do a Google search for "central high school oplin" to find out if Nathaniel was even on track. The thing is, this is old news.
So if you're outraged, as Nathaniel is, I would say that you should check your facts first, before reporting "news" that a) is no longer true, and b) has its facts not completely accurate.
The fact of the matter is that OPLIN linked to site A. Site A linked to site B. Site B had information on the environment at one time. Site B now contains adult themed material. I won't say porn because one browser opened up to an underwear site, and the underwear was men's briefs and bikini bottoms. Garish colors, but not pornographic. Either way, you have OPLIN -> Site A -> SiteB, rather then OPLIN -> Site B. I proclaim OPLIN innocent, and Nathaniel misrepresenting facts.
From what I understand, the original message said that he had submitted a patch, thus indicating he had fixed it himself.
It's not steganography, and it's not even very clever, but a question arises. This is a gif. It's not text, and thus compiler readable. It's not anything that can be read immediately, so is this illegal?
http://www.chaos.org/img/main/news/de cssx.gif
Count me in. I'm all for grilling a little Bambi or Thumper. I'll even bring some potato salad.
If anyone's seriously interested, I'm willing to spend some time and contact people in KC or somewhere similarly central to host this.
Also, I've registered screwpeta.com which I'm willing to contribute for organizing the BBQ, as well as maybe rehosting the original peta.org pages. Someone would have to donate some colocation though.
Generate an md5sum for the title of the file, then rename the file as such:
8c3bbd53022cef66ba014bf82d0b1584_www.chaos.org_fil elist.html.mp3
Then of course, you have a web page called filelist.html or some such that people can use to cross reference.
It's not perfect, but:
Hear, Hear!
While having X amount of /.'ers hit them with sugar and spice is not going to make them change their mind, (I'd love to be in the board meeting for that. "The people say they don't want our ads. Maybe we should close up shop." Yeah, right) but if we all tell them politely that we're not going to do business with their partners, and we're going to talk to our congress people about legislating them out of business, then they may start to figure out another way to blow their investor's money away.
Most of us here are geeks/nerds/whathaveyou, but those of us who are over 18 and in the US can vote. If you've registered to do so, then send a nice piece of email to your congress people and tell them you'd like your privacy protected on the Internet.
The "real world" is coming in after us, people. It's time we use the tools that are available to us to keep them where we want them. So we have to play with the politicos. But we have to play with them nice and professionally.
Use a spell checker. Clear your grammar with your English major/grad buddy. Remove those swear words. Don't be a jerk. They're not going to listen to you otherwise, and they'll do whatever they want with their business plans or introduced legislation, or God help us, voter initiatives.
Excessive Use of the <B> tag used in place of a Clue-by-Four unavailable via HTTP. :)