JFK are the majority party in my area (two out of three councillors, used to be 3 of 3 until one of them lost his seat int he last election), I see a lot of their campaign literature. The policy of campaigning for the handing over of Kashmir to Pakistan is featured in that literature. If you look at the activities of the councillors over their terms of office a lot of their activities are based around campaigning for Kashmir to be handed over to Pakistan. I do have first hand knowledge of your assertions. That blatant lie has set your credibility to less than zero.
Unfortunately UKIP seems to have strong links to the British National Party (i.e. National Front with more expensive suits). Not the sort of people I want to vote for. Some people have suggested the RESPECT Coalition. Unfortunately that coalition has strong links to parties like the Justice For Kashmir party (now calling themselves People's Justice Party) who are a Pro-Islamic Pro-Pakistani Anti-Everyone else party who's core policies (their rasion d'etre infact) are based around separating Kashmir from India and giving it to Pakistan. Again, not people I want to vote for.
I think I'll be voting Labour again ont he grounds that that they've got the best chance of keeping the JFK out in my area.
How about those people who paste emails, IM logs &c into their blogs? Except in very restricted circumstances, you have no control over what someone does with an email (or IM log &c) once it's been sent/the IM session has finished. In the same way you couldn't stop someone from forwarding on a paper letter, which they could also copy, read out to others or pin it to a notice board. If you don't want something spread around, deseminated and categorised then don't send it to anyone.
Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned that any company along the path a mail took could store and analyse a mail to which someone responded that they wouldn't do that cos there'd be no gain to it. Well, there could be huge commercial gain to some. What is to stop your ISP from scanning the emails you send and recieve for key words and using that to profile you for advertisements? Maybe there's something in their privacy policy that would, maybe not. How many users read their ISPs privacy policy before signing up? How many users have sufficient legal knowledge to check there are no loopholes in their ISPs privacy policy? Or something in the terms of service that overrides the privacy policy. Who's to say that your email isn't being monitored for the presence of keywords that might relate to security issues which if they appear too often will flag you as a possible terrorist?
If you don't want it scanned then don't send it, if you have to send it then encrypt it. That goes for email and paper mail.
And if you feel uncomfortable when someone rings your doorbell, do the sensible thing (what you should have done in the first place to avoid being robbed) and excercise your 2nd amendment rights, assuming you're a fellow American. Defend yourself.
Next stop Death Row for blowing away a troupe of Girl Guides who were going door to door selling cookies.
There are people who have legitimate reasons for ringing your doorbell, a lot of people. Also, in my experience, people intending to rob you and beat you up rarely ring the doorbell. Criminals who ring your doorbell are usually involved in, so called, white collar crime such as fraud. White collar crime is, societally, as destructive (if not more so) as violent crime but is rarely if ever punished effectively.
Stephen
PS It might be a good idea to actually read the second ammendment (RTFC) before asserting rights under it.
More money means better lawyers. If you get a good enough lawyer then you can get off entirely no matter what you're guilty of. If they can't get you off they can often argue mitigation to get you a shorter sentence in an easier prison.
Looks faked to me. Searching the Reuters site itself with the phrase "Michael Moore Hospitalized" returns no hits. From that I draw the conclusion that either you made it up your self or were duped by someone else who made it up.
Actuyally I don't. I do know, from talking to people I know who work in LA, a number of them in hospitals and medical centres, that pollution (and poverty) related illnesses are a serious problem. I cited the Michael Moore quote because others are likely to have heard of that, not everyone has the links to LA that I have.
I doubt it. The Michael Moore I was refering to, whilst a little chunky, does not strike me as being so obese as to be able to lose an asthma inhaler (or TV remote) in folds of skin, he certainly seems to be well short of 500lbs. He is currently (or at least was recently) in Cannes for the film festival and last I saw him he would not need two Gurneys to carry him.
I searched news.yahoo.com and news.google.com with the keywords "michael moore hospitalized" and got no hits that looked similar to that story. Where did you find that story?
In "Bowling for Columbine" didn't Michael Moore (or one of the people he interviewed) mention that in LA (often viewed as a city with a serious violent crime and murder problem) you are something like 100 times more likely to be killed or seriously injured by the pollution than through violent crime? How about punishing those people who drive huge SUVs and trucks on urban and suburban streets but never go off road or carry anything heavier than a week's groceries in them?
I see that as an arguement for making prisons harsher, not for killing people because they couldn't afford a good lawyer.
I remember reading, several years back, a report from somewhere in the US government that actually did a cost comparrison of executing someone vs keeping them in jail for 60 years (expected upper limit for 'life without parole'). Keeping them behind bars for 60 years worked out significantly cheaper (by a factor of 15-20 as I recall). Although certain states (I believe Texas is the best known) make a big thing about the cheapness of execution they ignore many of the costs. Sure the chemicals are cheap and there is s cost cap on the last meal. There are various factors such as death row guards tend to be paid significantly more than general population guards, there are more guards per prisoner then in general population and the security has to be a lot more strict. You are dealing with people who literally have nothing to lose, you're going to kill them in a horrible and painful way anyhow so waving a gun in their face is unlikely to get them to stop, infact they might prefer a clean death from a gun shot to a painful death in the chamber. Also there is the costs of the appeals that the victim is entitled to, and must be entitled to to reduce the chance of miscarriages of justice. I don't recall if compensation to the families of wrongfully executed people was included, but that must push the cost up a little.
I can only go on my own experiences of trying to run Oracle on Redhat 9 and SuSE Professional 8.1 and the responses I got when I googled for solutions and asked around on various technical forums. I eventually got it working but only with some serious kludges. Then I got a hold of SLES8.1 and installed it, it worked perfectly with no kludges.
'Minor Problems' like it just plain doesn't work? I can only go on my own experiences of trying to run Oracle on Redhat 9 and SuSE Linux Professional 8.1 and the responses I got when I googled for solutions and asked around on various technical forums. I eventually got it working but only with some serious kludges. Then I got a hold of SLES8.1 and installed it, it worked perfectly with no kludges.
Oracle, like all other databases, is pretty disk intensive for non-trivial volumes of data so you'll probably want to go for SCSI rather than IDE if you can. IDE will work tho'. Running Oracle on Linux you need either Redhat AS or SuSE Enterprise Server, it requires libraries not shipped in the free download versions or the personal/desktop versions. There are work arounds but they're far from guaranteed and you need to get seriously down and dirty with the innards. Not a job for the faint of heart or technically unskilled.
Already got one. I have a method of storing in excess of a Gb of information on a 60mmx60mm piece of porous plastic less than 1mm thick by coating one surface of the sheet with gelatin into which is embedded silver halide crystals and certain other chemicals. Currently it's Write Once only (WORM) but given the small size and very low cost I do not see this as a problem, infact given the durability (if stored correctly) of this material I believed that it would be excellent for use as a medium to long term storage solution. No electric power or electronics are required in the storage or reading of the media, although methods using both exist and some users may prefer to use them.
I love doing that. A lot of the projects I work on involve getting 2 or more (usually 3-5) external comapanies together and usually an internal service section or two, they're mostly integration type projects. Conference calls are fun, even more so is when you get them to come for an onsite meeting. Firstly they always insist that the meeting be on their site so they'll have their techies on hand. We refuse and say if you want you can bring a techie with you. When they show up there's always a 2-1 ratio of PHBs to techies (and each company sends multiple techies). So you sit them around the table and get them drinks. The first 30-50 minutes are taken up by a silent game of "Who's got the most 733T toys?" as everyone puts their laptops, PDAs &c on the table infront of them. The competition is usually fiercest between the PHBs, techies tend to have a mixture of self bought Palms, iPAQs and (if they're really badly paid) old Psions coupled with a 2 year old laptop that was a cast off from a manager. Occaisionally you see a techie with an iPod or a newish laptop infront of them. I think the former is probably a sign that they don't have a PDA and the latter usually means they work for Microsoft.
Once the winner has made himself known (it's always a male) the meeting begins in earnst, that is the blame storming begins. The PHBs sling accusations at them interspersed with occasional huddles with their techies after which they emerge to say something outrageous (e.g. "Windows 2003 server has a much lower TCO than Linux!") and the techies visably flinch. Then time comes for lunch where the PHBs all head for different top rated resteurants (trying to get us to go with them and not the other companies) whilst I join all the techies down in the nearest pub. Over the first beer we discuss the problems, over the second we rough out the solution and over the third we sketch out the details of the solution and devise a rough project plan for implementation.
Whilst the techies head off to retrieve their repective PHBs from which ever lap dancing club or department store they've found themselves in, I head back to the office and put the designs into Impress, lug my laptop down to the meeting room and hook up to the projector. The PHBs all wander back, sit down and try to kick off their blame storming again. I present the solution that was designed over lunch, usually to the howls of the Microsoft PHBs becuase I'm running Impress on SuSE Linux. Six months to 2 years later all suppliers involved announce how they designed and implemented this wonderful system. All by them selves. With no help from any one. Honest! Really! They're really telling the truth now! For sure! It's all those other companies that are liars!
Still be Chinese customs tho'. Hong Kong now being part of China. I know China still keeps it fairly sequestered from the rest of the mainland, it's still part of China tho'.
I thought I was as well. My view on the vi vs Emacs arguement is that different people have different preferences and ways of working. For some people vi suits them, for others Emacs suits them and others like Joe or another editor. Personally, I've used both vi and Emacs and found that vi works best for me when I'm using a text terminal. I've tried a number of X-Windows editors and haven't found anything I like, I just fire up a terminal window and use vi. On MS-Windows I use Programmer's File Editor if I can or Notepad if that's all that's available. If Emacs works best for you, great. That's you happy.
There's something similar already happening. Actors are paid to hang around in bars, cafes and other public places and, when there are people close enough to over hear, have a scripted conversation that promotes a product.
To take an obvious example, why write about how wonderful Emacs is when you can write about how 'vi' is utter garbage? Both are truths, of course, but one looks a bit naive.
Or to put it another way: To take an obvious example, why write about how wonderful vi is when you can write about how EMACS is utter garbage? Both are truths, of course, but one looks a bit naive.
Do get the point tho'. A couple of my hobbies are writing short stories and photography. I belong to a number of online forums for discussion of these and, hopefully knowledgable, critique of people's efforts. Many of them are over run with peole posting truly excreable material, material that has significant (but usually fixable) problems which are then followed by feedback which is utterly praising the piece like it was the best piece of writing or photography ever. If anyone dares to post an honest critique with suggestions on how to improve the shot/story then they are immediately bombarded with flames and the forum is filled with calls to the moderators to eject and ban them. Of course you do occasionally get a troll who will post a flame dishonestly critiquing a piece and not offering sugestions for improvement (usually easily recognised by the fact that it's very brief such as "That sucks, you're crap. Why don't you just kill yourself and save us from your crap!" rather than being several pages filled with suggestions). If anything the trolls tend to be just ignored. It's like people have lost the ability to distinguish between honest polite critique and sadistic flaming. It's actually very annoying, as someone who is learning in the field. If I post something and someone can see a way to improve it then I want to know so I can incorporate that and see if my work improves. Mindless praise helps no-one.
If hosting it yourself isn't a need then you can get an account on Live Journal (or other sites using the same code) for free or a small subscription if you don't object to paying people for their work but free accounts have all the basic blogging features. A paid account usually gets you extra features and/or means that you get put on the faster servers.
I agree that LJ is a different model from the "Download the code and host the service yourself" type of apps. Depends on what your needs are which model is better for you, LJ works for me and a lot fo other people. Don't write it off just because it doesn't fit the way you want things to work, MoveableType et al doesn't fit what I want to do but I recognise that they work for some people.
If you tell SpamCop that you won't accept munged (their term for reports that have had the email address removed) reports then when someone submits a mail from you it will give them a choice of either not sending the complaint to you or sending it unmunged. That way you'll only get complaints with the email address intact so you can wash it out of your spam lists.
If you're claiming to be legit and someone reports you via SpamCop then just explain to them the situation and if they believe you they'll send a warning to the person who submitted the message. If you're signed up with Habeas then they'll definately warn the user. Too many warnings and the user will get cut off from the SpamCop service. I've noticed that a lot of lists I'm on have started sending out a message once every couple of months that contains no advertising material at all basically saying "Hey, you're signed up to this list. If you don't want to be here's how to unsubscribe.", somethign like that might add credence to claims that your not a spammer. The nature of the spam industry is that if what you do looks like it might be spam then the onus is on you to show that it's not, much like if you walk into a bank carrying a shot gun and wearing a mask the onus is on you to prove that you're not planning to rob it.
Depends to a large degree on the nature of the relationship. If they're your supplier in a non-monopoly market then it's true that they have to deal with you. However if they are the customer in a non-monopoly market then you have to deal with them. Remember the golden rule, them what's got the gold make the rules.
Totally agree with the Word vs Office point though.
True, although the costs of switching are odften short term and the savings long term. Which can be a problem in pitching to senior management. You pitch "OK it's going to save us $200,000 over 5 years for an upfront cost of $10,000 over the first year and $2,000 in the second year." and they only hear the cost part. They see the short term drop in profits and it's effect on their bonus and the share price. Then they say no. In many ways it's easier to sell StarOffice than OpenOffice.org as at least Sun have a marketing department, plus automatic credibility due to being outsiders.
Actually, on the subject of StarOffice. Due to the heavy discount (on purchase, training ("train the trainer") and support costs, remember enterprises like support and training) and free/very cheap consultancy Sun give to public sector bodies in Europe (and I assume elsewhere) it actually works out significantly cheaper to switch to StarOffice than it does OpenOffice.org for such bodies. worth bearing in mind.
Slashdot Mirror
JFK are the majority party in my area (two out of three councillors, used to be 3 of 3 until one of them lost his seat int he last election), I see a lot of their campaign literature. The policy of campaigning for the handing over of Kashmir to Pakistan is featured in that literature. If you look at the activities of the councillors over their terms of office a lot of their activities are based around campaigning for Kashmir to be handed over to Pakistan. I do have first hand knowledge of your assertions. That blatant lie has set your credibility to less than zero.
Stephen
Unfortunately UKIP seems to have strong links to the British National Party (i.e. National Front with more expensive suits). Not the sort of people I want to vote for. Some people have suggested the RESPECT Coalition. Unfortunately that coalition has strong links to parties like the Justice For Kashmir party (now calling themselves People's Justice Party) who are a Pro-Islamic Pro-Pakistani Anti-Everyone else party who's core policies (their rasion d'etre infact) are based around separating Kashmir from India and giving it to Pakistan. Again, not people I want to vote for.
I think I'll be voting Labour again ont he grounds that that they've got the best chance of keeping the JFK out in my area.
Stephen
How about those people who paste emails, IM logs &c into their blogs? Except in very restricted circumstances, you have no control over what someone does with an email (or IM log &c) once it's been sent/the IM session has finished. In the same way you couldn't stop someone from forwarding on a paper letter, which they could also copy, read out to others or pin it to a notice board. If you don't want something spread around, deseminated and categorised then don't send it to anyone.
Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned that any company along the path a mail took could store and analyse a mail to which someone responded that they wouldn't do that cos there'd be no gain to it. Well, there could be huge commercial gain to some. What is to stop your ISP from scanning the emails you send and recieve for key words and using that to profile you for advertisements? Maybe there's something in their privacy policy that would, maybe not. How many users read their ISPs privacy policy before signing up? How many users have sufficient legal knowledge to check there are no loopholes in their ISPs privacy policy? Or something in the terms of service that overrides the privacy policy. Who's to say that your email isn't being monitored for the presence of keywords that might relate to security issues which if they appear too often will flag you as a possible terrorist?
If you don't want it scanned then don't send it, if you have to send it then encrypt it. That goes for email and paper mail.
Stephen
Next stop Death Row for blowing away a troupe of Girl Guides who were going door to door selling cookies.
There are people who have legitimate reasons for ringing your doorbell, a lot of people. Also, in my experience, people intending to rob you and beat you up rarely ring the doorbell. Criminals who ring your doorbell are usually involved in, so called, white collar crime such as fraud. White collar crime is, societally, as destructive (if not more so) as violent crime but is rarely if ever punished effectively.
Stephen
PS It might be a good idea to actually read the second ammendment (RTFC) before asserting rights under it.
More money means better lawyers. If you get a good enough lawyer then you can get off entirely no matter what you're guilty of. If they can't get you off they can often argue mitigation to get you a shorter sentence in an easier prison.
Stephen
You say that like it's a bad thing!
Stephen
Looks faked to me. Searching the Reuters site itself with the phrase "Michael Moore Hospitalized" returns no hits. From that I draw the conclusion that either you made it up your self or were duped by someone else who made it up.
Stephen
Actuyally I don't. I do know, from talking to people I know who work in LA, a number of them in hospitals and medical centres, that pollution (and poverty) related illnesses are a serious problem. I cited the Michael Moore quote because others are likely to have heard of that, not everyone has the links to LA that I have.
Stephen
I doubt it. The Michael Moore I was refering to, whilst a little chunky, does not strike me as being so obese as to be able to lose an asthma inhaler (or TV remote) in folds of skin, he certainly seems to be well short of 500lbs. He is currently (or at least was recently) in Cannes for the film festival and last I saw him he would not need two Gurneys to carry him.
I searched news.yahoo.com and news.google.com with the keywords "michael moore hospitalized" and got no hits that looked similar to that story. Where did you find that story?
Stephen
In "Bowling for Columbine" didn't Michael Moore (or one of the people he interviewed) mention that in LA (often viewed as a city with a serious violent crime and murder problem) you are something like 100 times more likely to be killed or seriously injured by the pollution than through violent crime? How about punishing those people who drive huge SUVs and trucks on urban and suburban streets but never go off road or carry anything heavier than a week's groceries in them?
Stephen
I see that as an arguement for making prisons harsher, not for killing people because they couldn't afford a good lawyer.
I remember reading, several years back, a report from somewhere in the US government that actually did a cost comparrison of executing someone vs keeping them in jail for 60 years (expected upper limit for 'life without parole'). Keeping them behind bars for 60 years worked out significantly cheaper (by a factor of 15-20 as I recall). Although certain states (I believe Texas is the best known) make a big thing about the cheapness of execution they ignore many of the costs. Sure the chemicals are cheap and there is s cost cap on the last meal. There are various factors such as death row guards tend to be paid significantly more than general population guards, there are more guards per prisoner then in general population and the security has to be a lot more strict. You are dealing with people who literally have nothing to lose, you're going to kill them in a horrible and painful way anyhow so waving a gun in their face is unlikely to get them to stop, infact they might prefer a clean death from a gun shot to a painful death in the chamber. Also there is the costs of the appeals that the victim is entitled to, and must be entitled to to reduce the chance of miscarriages of justice. I don't recall if compensation to the families of wrongfully executed people was included, but that must push the cost up a little.
Stephen
I can only go on my own experiences of trying to run Oracle on Redhat 9 and SuSE Professional 8.1 and the responses I got when I googled for solutions and asked around on various technical forums. I eventually got it working but only with some serious kludges. Then I got a hold of SLES8.1 and installed it, it worked perfectly with no kludges.
Stephen
'Minor Problems' like it just plain doesn't work? I can only go on my own experiences of trying to run Oracle on Redhat 9 and SuSE Linux Professional 8.1 and the responses I got when I googled for solutions and asked around on various technical forums. I eventually got it working but only with some serious kludges. Then I got a hold of SLES8.1 and installed it, it worked perfectly with no kludges.
Stephen
Oracle, like all other databases, is pretty disk intensive for non-trivial volumes of data so you'll probably want to go for SCSI rather than IDE if you can. IDE will work tho'. Running Oracle on Linux you need either Redhat AS or SuSE Enterprise Server, it requires libraries not shipped in the free download versions or the personal/desktop versions. There are work arounds but they're far from guaranteed and you need to get seriously down and dirty with the innards. Not a job for the faint of heart or technically unskilled.
Stephen
Already got one. I have a method of storing in excess of a Gb of information on a 60mmx60mm piece of porous plastic less than 1mm thick by coating one surface of the sheet with gelatin into which is embedded silver halide crystals and certain other chemicals. Currently it's Write Once only (WORM) but given the small size and very low cost I do not see this as a problem, infact given the durability (if stored correctly) of this material I believed that it would be excellent for use as a medium to long term storage solution. No electric power or electronics are required in the storage or reading of the media, although methods using both exist and some users may prefer to use them.
I think I'll call it........film.
Stephen
I love doing that. A lot of the projects I work on involve getting 2 or more (usually 3-5) external comapanies together and usually an internal service section or two, they're mostly integration type projects. Conference calls are fun, even more so is when you get them to come for an onsite meeting. Firstly they always insist that the meeting be on their site so they'll have their techies on hand. We refuse and say if you want you can bring a techie with you. When they show up there's always a 2-1 ratio of PHBs to techies (and each company sends multiple techies). So you sit them around the table and get them drinks. The first 30-50 minutes are taken up by a silent game of "Who's got the most 733T toys?" as everyone puts their laptops, PDAs &c on the table infront of them. The competition is usually fiercest between the PHBs, techies tend to have a mixture of self bought Palms, iPAQs and (if they're really badly paid) old Psions coupled with a 2 year old laptop that was a cast off from a manager. Occaisionally you see a techie with an iPod or a newish laptop infront of them. I think the former is probably a sign that they don't have a PDA and the latter usually means they work for Microsoft.
Once the winner has made himself known (it's always a male) the meeting begins in earnst, that is the blame storming begins. The PHBs sling accusations at them interspersed with occasional huddles with their techies after which they emerge to say something outrageous (e.g. "Windows 2003 server has a much lower TCO than Linux!") and the techies visably flinch. Then time comes for lunch where the PHBs all head for different top rated resteurants (trying to get us to go with them and not the other companies) whilst I join all the techies down in the nearest pub. Over the first beer we discuss the problems, over the second we rough out the solution and over the third we sketch out the details of the solution and devise a rough project plan for implementation.
Whilst the techies head off to retrieve their repective PHBs from which ever lap dancing club or department store they've found themselves in, I head back to the office and put the designs into Impress, lug my laptop down to the meeting room and hook up to the projector. The PHBs all wander back, sit down and try to kick off their blame storming again. I present the solution that was designed over lunch, usually to the howls of the Microsoft PHBs becuase I'm running Impress on SuSE Linux. Six months to 2 years later all suppliers involved announce how they designed and implemented this wonderful system. All by them selves. With no help from any one. Honest! Really! They're really telling the truth now! For sure! It's all those other companies that are liars!
Stephen
Still be Chinese customs tho'. Hong Kong now being part of China. I know China still keeps it fairly sequestered from the rest of the mainland, it's still part of China tho'.
Stephen
ITYM debee to improve his dB
Stephen
I thought I was as well. My view on the vi vs Emacs arguement is that different people have different preferences and ways of working. For some people vi suits them, for others Emacs suits them and others like Joe or another editor. Personally, I've used both vi and Emacs and found that vi works best for me when I'm using a text terminal. I've tried a number of X-Windows editors and haven't found anything I like, I just fire up a terminal window and use vi. On MS-Windows I use Programmer's File Editor if I can or Notepad if that's all that's available. If Emacs works best for you, great. That's you happy.
Stephen
There's something similar already happening. Actors are paid to hang around in bars, cafes and other public places and, when there are people close enough to over hear, have a scripted conversation that promotes a product.
Stephen
Or to put it another way: To take an obvious example, why write about how wonderful vi is when you can write about how EMACS is utter garbage? Both are truths, of course, but one looks a bit naive.
Do get the point tho'. A couple of my hobbies are writing short stories and photography. I belong to a number of online forums for discussion of these and, hopefully knowledgable, critique of people's efforts. Many of them are over run with peole posting truly excreable material, material that has significant (but usually fixable) problems which are then followed by feedback which is utterly praising the piece like it was the best piece of writing or photography ever. If anyone dares to post an honest critique with suggestions on how to improve the shot/story then they are immediately bombarded with flames and the forum is filled with calls to the moderators to eject and ban them. Of course you do occasionally get a troll who will post a flame dishonestly critiquing a piece and not offering sugestions for improvement (usually easily recognised by the fact that it's very brief such as "That sucks, you're crap. Why don't you just kill yourself and save us from your crap!" rather than being several pages filled with suggestions). If anything the trolls tend to be just ignored. It's like people have lost the ability to distinguish between honest polite critique and sadistic flaming. It's actually very annoying, as someone who is learning in the field. If I post something and someone can see a way to improve it then I want to know so I can incorporate that and see if my work improves. Mindless praise helps no-one.
Stephen
If hosting it yourself isn't a need then you can get an account on Live Journal (or other sites using the same code) for free or a small subscription if you don't object to paying people for their work but free accounts have all the basic blogging features. A paid account usually gets you extra features and/or means that you get put on the faster servers.
I agree that LJ is a different model from the "Download the code and host the service yourself" type of apps. Depends on what your needs are which model is better for you, LJ works for me and a lot fo other people. Don't write it off just because it doesn't fit the way you want things to work, MoveableType et al doesn't fit what I want to do but I recognise that they work for some people.
Stephen
If you tell SpamCop that you won't accept munged (their term for reports that have had the email address removed) reports then when someone submits a mail from you it will give them a choice of either not sending the complaint to you or sending it unmunged. That way you'll only get complaints with the email address intact so you can wash it out of your spam lists.
If you're claiming to be legit and someone reports you via SpamCop then just explain to them the situation and if they believe you they'll send a warning to the person who submitted the message. If you're signed up with Habeas then they'll definately warn the user. Too many warnings and the user will get cut off from the SpamCop service. I've noticed that a lot of lists I'm on have started sending out a message once every couple of months that contains no advertising material at all basically saying "Hey, you're signed up to this list. If you don't want to be here's how to unsubscribe.", somethign like that might add credence to claims that your not a spammer. The nature of the spam industry is that if what you do looks like it might be spam then the onus is on you to show that it's not, much like if you walk into a bank carrying a shot gun and wearing a mask the onus is on you to prove that you're not planning to rob it.
Stephen
Depends to a large degree on the nature of the relationship. If they're your supplier in a non-monopoly market then it's true that they have to deal with you. However if they are the customer in a non-monopoly market then you have to deal with them. Remember the golden rule, them what's got the gold make the rules.
Totally agree with the Word vs Office point though.
Stephen
True, although the costs of switching are odften short term and the savings long term. Which can be a problem in pitching to senior management. You pitch "OK it's going to save us $200,000 over 5 years for an upfront cost of $10,000 over the first year and $2,000 in the second year." and they only hear the cost part. They see the short term drop in profits and it's effect on their bonus and the share price. Then they say no. In many ways it's easier to sell StarOffice than OpenOffice.org as at least Sun have a marketing department, plus automatic credibility due to being outsiders.
Actually, on the subject of StarOffice. Due to the heavy discount (on purchase, training ("train the trainer") and support costs, remember enterprises like support and training) and free/very cheap consultancy Sun give to public sector bodies in Europe (and I assume elsewhere) it actually works out significantly cheaper to switch to StarOffice than it does OpenOffice.org for such bodies. worth bearing in mind.
Stephen