Actually, yes. Believe mne, being there and doing it was far, far better than just telling about it *mwahahaha*
Though, on another note, for all those geeky guys - you think watching a video of a pile of five women making love to each other would be fun, you really need to *be* one of those five women to really grok "fun";)
This wasn't a Valentine's Day thingie, but a First Anniversary thing. I suspect it'll work for Valentine's Day too:)
My partner, Vikki, loves lobster. Can't get enough of it, in fact. So when I saw a 2-pound cold-water lobster tail, frozen, at the store, I bought it. Thawed, broiled it myself, basting it every three minutes with clarified butter and fresh-squeezed lemon juice, then served it to her on a very large plate, with a small bowl of peas (she likes canned peas. Go figure).
She ate until she could hold no more, and the next day she sliced up the leftover lobster and made a lobster sandwich. She still talks about this, fourteen years later.
Yeah, rocks are nice, but something truely memorable in the kitchen can be even nicer. Expensive as this was, it sure was cheaper than a decent diamond ring... and, barring Alzheimer's, it's something that she'll never lose:)
Another idea, for later on, is to use some Moritz's "Ice Cubes" in the bedroom. They are very tasty, and melt just like tanning butter *GRIN* I know that I ruined one grrlfriend for life when I smeared some on her backside, then kissed and licked it off, telling her that she'll never again be able to tell somebody to "Kiss my *ss!" without thinking of me *WEG*
Re:It's all about the money
on
NARAS vs. the RIAA
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Are you going to try and convince me now that the 1s and 0s that make up your bank account are not property because they exist as money only due to government regulation and you can't stick a fork in them? How about transferring it to me then!!??!
Sure, how about if I transfer, from my account to yours, the 1s and 0s that represent -1000000 dollars? *GRINS*
Owning "intellectual property" is like owning the wind. Once an idea is manifested, it can no longer be owned, as anybody who saw it, heard it, touched it, can now use it and even improve upon it, without depriving you of anything. All our laws are trying to do is encourage people to be creative, to innovate and thus advance the well-being of all our society. Big monied interests have been trying to use these laws to make more money, as is their obligation under capitalism. Eventually, though, the roof *will* fall in on them, and what emerges from the chaos afterwards will be a radically different world.
I'm a small-scale jewelry artist. I create items that I consider beautiful, and sometimes sell them, or just give them away. The designs are, by current thinking, my "property", but I don't care. I create for *me*, and once an item has been created, duplicating it endlessly becomes a chore, keeping me from doing any more creative work. So, to stay creative, I refuse to "protect" my "property" by hiring lawyers to fight anybody whose designs look similar to mine. My muse freely gave the ideas to me, and I freely share them with the world.
Often listed on labels as "natural flavors", MSG is found in seaweeds, and it makes things taste much better. Unfortunately, too much MSG can backfire - it makes things taste great, but for many hours afterward, I get extreme heartburn:(
As many prepared foods use "natural flavors", it makes shopping more than a bit of a chore, in that I need to read *all* that tiny print of "ingredients", on everything I buy. Grrrr. And all this stems from a childhood spent eating cheap food flavored with Accent, which is mostly MSG.
You go through school, going deep into debt, to learn the trade. You get a job, where they work your nuggies off, for a "salary" that's laughable in hourly terms. Then, after ten years struggle, you're either RIFfed, or, if you're darned "lucky", they'll "reward" you by taking away the only thing that made the job even tolerable - you'll become a low-level manager, and never again be permitted to dirty your fingers typing in code.
Thanks, I'll take a pass on IT as a career. In many ways, I'm glad that I came down with MS *before* I got RIFfed, as it has allowed me the time to realize that my "career" had cost me my health, my social life, and one of the things that I enjoyed most - the joy of crafting a well-thought-out and well-executed program with my own two hands.
Pension? Get real! To get that, you have to stay in one company for ages. Fat chance of that, with companies dropping like flies all the time.
No, you might actually be better off if you skipped school, and stuck with your "You want fries with that?" menial job. At least you'd have some semblance of a life with that, and after paying off the student loan that allowed you to join the exciting and fast-paced world of IT, I'm not so sure that you wouldn't actually be ahead financially, too.
how easy it is to screw the pooch raw with progressive income taxes (note that the states that have blown their budgets the most are those with income taxes, CA, OR, OH, IL, NY, whereas non-income tax states like TN, FL, NH, TX, are not looking at such bad looking budgets.
Um, Washington has no income tax, and its budget is in terrible shape. Could be our illustrious elected officials, true, but the point is, just not having a progressive income tax is not the only way to have a screwed-up economy during a depression.
As a woman who was in the IT field ("senior software engineer", until I became disabled), I can understand why few women would want to become involved. The hours were horrible, the pay sucked, and I routinely saw men ignoring whatever women had to say about the project. Plus, given the last item, men got all the promotions to management, and more money, while the women were allowed to bring them coffee.
During my tenure at the company, we had 4 women who worked there. Three of us left, and the 4th only kept her job by boffing the boss at lunch. This is *not* the kind of environment that women find "inviting". Small wonder why few women are inclined to get into this field. It's just not worth the trouble.
Yes, it's great, isn't it? Even a cheapskate like me can afford a huge drive now. I vividly recall back when I was able to find a Miniscribe 3650, 40mb, for $400. Wow! Nowadays, anything less than 40gb isn't worth looking at.
We stuffed that 3650 in Igloo, running Microport Unix., and went to town:) Goddess, the fun of shopping for a controller card that could support a 1:1 interleave, and fine-tuning the system's skew factor to really max out performance. Even better, grab an RLL controller, and turn the 40mb into 60! Way cool:)
I'm sure that I can remember things further back than this - stuff like walking, crying, toys, butterflies, lightningbugs and so on - but my first really vivid memory was of learning to read.
Up till that point, I had memorized all the "childrens' books" that we had, and was quite able to "read" them back again, even if the book was upside-down, or if I had my eyes closed:) Then, suddenly one afternoon, the letters on the page coalesced into *words*, and I was able to really *read* them!
I ran all over the house, reading the book to my mom, my dad, and anybody else I saw. It was the most amazing thing I have ever discovered, before or since:)
That began a life-long infatuation with books. I wore out countless batteries reading, by flashlight, under the covers at night. I read whole encyclopedias, dictionaries and thesauruses, but my favorite books as a child were the "How and Why" books that explained science and technology. Small wonder why I grew up to be an engineer:)
If I'm a contractor and someone pays me to come in and install/troubleshoot/fix software and/or document for them how to do it again, I am certainly going to expect that they will not then release all of my work publicly (and I'll write the contract to that effect).
Ummmm, excuse me, but if you're a contractor, and I hire you to write something, that's a work for hire. Unless we both agree that I cannot disseminate the stuff that I paid for, it's *mine*.
Yes, you put that bit in your contract, and that's ok. It means that we both agreed to it. However, *I* would never hire *you*, with that in the contract. I wish you well - and when I see you on the corner, holding a piece of cardboard looking for spare change, I'll just smile and walk on. If *I* hire somebody to do something for me, I sure as heck will own it afterwards, and I'll be able to do with it what I want.
As for the "free software, paid documentation", I'd suggest actually *reading* the source code, and writing your own documentation for it. Then you can freely disseminate *that*, and laugh at trhe silly people who are trying to shake users down for the documentation. But then, that's just me, being obnoxious:)
A few years back, there was a small study done that showed a different source of pluripotent stem cells - the nose. It seems that stem cells in the nasal cavity are already adept at becoming nerve cells.
I don't recall hearing of any follow-up to this, though it seemed very promising. I try to follow these things, as they offer a good chance of reversing the damage done to me by (secondary progressive) multiple sclerosis.
I've been hoping that such research might offer a way of reversing the damage done, in time that my skill set as a software engineer (microcontrollers and device drivers) would still be useful as anything but a curiosity, but *sigh* things don't look good. If I'm extremely lucky, it'll be only about 15 years till the technology is there, and by then, who'd want to hire a 60-year-old engineer who's been out of circulation foir the past two decades? Grrrr.
It'd be rather like a large helium-filled balloon, tethered, with a 5-watt 2M rig and a TNC, possibly powered by a battery/solar cell combination. Put a bunch of these up, and you've got it (albeit slow as heck).
Now, make it a dual-band unit, and run it much faster than a normal TNC. Have the up and downlinks to the subscribers on one channel, and the "between units" link on another one. That should help the speed, and allow for greater coverage as well.
I think it'd be fun:) Just like Field Day, all year long.
Scientists believe that immune-suppressing drugs that keep transplant recipients from rejecting their new organs or other items increase their risks of dying from infection significantly. I can't remember the exact statistic, but ISTR that a transplant recipient has something like a one in ten chance of dying within 7 years
I had a cornea transplant over a decade ago. I was given some prednisolone acetate (I think) drops to use for several weeks, but after that was over, I had no further drugs.
I'm still alive. Maybe it's not *all* transplants, or *all* drugs, that might have the problem? Though I'd rather suspect that a full face transplant would likely be major enough to need major drugs.
Yes, I *can* whack and remove most spam without ever opening it. That's not the point. I don't want to ***EVER*** see it, period. I am SOOOOO utterly sick of ads to "add 1 to three inches to your penis", and "the best teen hardcore site" and "real rape" sites and great places to buy Viagra without a prescription, and great mortgage rates, and... and... and.... I. No. Longer. Want. To. See. Them. Ever.
Anything that allows me to filter out *some* of it is no longer enough. I want a "white list", a client that says "only accept email from these trusted friends, and tell everybody else that I died."
Back in the bad old days of packet radio, there was a thing called a "bud list". By adding somebody's callsign to the list, you could either never allow him/her to connect to you at all, or *only* allow those on your bud list to connect to you.
I've been looking for this ability in an email program for a while. If you're on my list, you get through. If not, the mail gets bounced back as though my account had ceased to exist.
I "only" get some 40 spam messages a day now. Just yesterday, a friend complained that she is getting some 180 spam messages a day... and she checks her email every few days. Yikes! She needs this "white list" ability even more than I do!
A long time ago, I worked for a very small place that sold integrated systems for vertical markets. It was *small* - just myself and the owner, and when the day came that the owner started using the phrases "cash flow difficulties" and "your paycheck" in the same sentence, I promptly found other employment.
For several months after the company folded, the customers called me to come out and fix their systems. Most of the customers were very good about it, and I was happy to be able to help them. One place, though, was a real bear.
To start with, they had bought the computers from somebody else, who never bothered with the software. The machines were constantly doing the crash-n-burn thing, and the shoddy software that my boss wrote didn't help things much. They were also in a rather bad neighborhood, one where a single white girl was decidedly not safe after dark. Lastly, they were going through bankruptcy too, so they had zero money to pay for anything.
So, given these, they had the gall to call and *demand* that I drive into the city, during rush hour, to fix their system. As for payment, they were not going to pay me at all - I guess they figured that the pitiful salary that I had made while working for my boss was plenty enough.
I tried, too, really I did. After spending about 2 hours to get past the first tollbooth en route in, I gave up, took the first exit, and then spent another two hours driving home. I had no problem with helping the other poor dumb suckers... err, "customers", yeah, that's the word:) who had bought the systems we sold, but that one place had copped a major attitude.
Needless to say, I never heard from them again, thankfully.
OK, so Farscape is great, and I deeply mourn its passing. However, Stargate is far from the only other straight-up sf show out there. My current favorite is a series, now filming its third season (and whose first season is being shown in the USA now, tho at horrible times) called "Starhunter"
The setting is not too distant. Mankind has moved from just the Earth, colonizing asteroids, moons and other planets in the system. Along with this spread, mankind is discovering that there are a few genes on the human genome that are of, well, alien origin.
Things get interesting. The ship's captain, Dante Montana, is searching for his child, abducted years ago by raiders. His neice, Percy, is the engineer, such as it is, on the ship. Luc is the other human crew member, and the computer rounds off the complement.
I've seen three and a half episodes thus far, and it looks rather good. Check them out, but beware, the listed "start time" is usually wrong (here in Seattle, it starts at 11:05 Saturday night).
I'm a regular eBay buyer. I buy gem material, and ancient coins. I'd been having pretty good luck for the past three years, only getting a few items that were, arguably, not as good as described. However, in the last 6 months, things have changed, possibly due to the economy going sour.
I've seen the "shipping and handling" charges skyrocket, from about $3 on average before to over $5 now, sometimes hitting over $10 for something that could be sent UPS for $3. I've bought stuff that was mis-identified, and had a biatch of a time trying to get a dime back from the sellers. I've even had flat-out fraud - one seller took my money, and that of several other people, then voluntarily suspended his registration, so I cannot even warn future (like, six months from now) victims.
EBay used to provide a service, "Safe Harbour", to help mediate in these affairs. Recently, however, the FAQ on what to do about fraud has changed, and it's now totally out of eBay's hands. I've tried calling the seller who took my money and ran, to no avail. It's been consistantly either busy, or no answer. I did a reverse-lookup on the phone number, and it doesn't even belong to the seller.
I'm just out the $20, I guess. EBay doesn't care. PayPal doesn't care. And, as long as people can get a new email account from Hotmail and Yahoo, they'll be able to do this. And, as long as the per-person bit is small, fraudsters will continue getting away with it.
I no longer feel safe unless I'm buying from a seller with ***lots*** of feedback. Perhaps one way eBay could help prevent this sort of fraud would be to require a real email account, not some cheesy Web-based freebie. Perhaps they need to verify address information - make registration cost a dollar, then snail-mail them a temporary password. However, though either approach would help deter fraudsters, both would cut down on eBay's revenue while increasing their costs, so I really don't see it changing soon. What may help force the change is if more buyers just stopped buying things. When eBay's bottom line begins to suffer, *then* we'll see a real change take place. Until then, caveat emptor.
You asked about high-power UV LEDS anbd / or lasers, particularly those in the near-violet range? Hmm, there *are* high-powered UV LEDs in the 395nm range. They come with lots of warnings about the damage that the UV can do, but they run under $3 each. Check them out here, just shy of half-way down the page.
I was looking for these earlier today - not for jamming Big Brother, but for use in a display of color-change gem materials. Most gem materials change fine under fluorescent light, but some work better between 395 and 400nm, which these LEDs will cover admirably.
While I was in high school (1974-1978), we used various HP minicomputers, timeshared. Along about '76-ish, there was a multi-person chat program called TALK, using the HP2000 Access's PFA / MWA (program/file access and multiple write access) to communicate between users via a file.
Not long after that, Ray Zeubler, a music student at WRHarper Junior College, started writing KINGDOM, a multi-user DnD-ish game. It was rather popular, and accounted for many boxes of paper on those old DECWriters and ASR-33s:) I wrote a cheesy knockoff, called SPACE, on my Schaumburg High account, S-350.
Out of high school, I eventually ended up working as a terminal aide at Harper. Ray graduated, and Kingdom went away, so I took Space, and re-vamped it into a Kingdom clone, running from my new T-920 account. This time, though, we used up barrels of electrons, playing it on faster CRTs:)
Somewhere along in here, Steve Woolfson wrote a version of Empire for the HP, but it never seemed to catch on like the Plato version did.
Eventually, I left Harper, for a career as a software engineer. Far as I know, Space, Kingdom (both Ray's and mine), Empire, Talk, all of those died. All were rather fun, and all wasted great piles of CPU time and disk space:) They actually also helped get many people into computers, well before they were commonplace items. Heck, as I told Matk Benson, my best HS buddy, when his brother Pat enrolled in a programming class, "Geez, will you look at that! Now every idiot and his brother are getting into computers!" *GRIN*
Actually, my partner Vikki was not at all interested in a diamond. She doesn't find them attractive. What she wanted was a top-grade emerald, which is more beautiful in her eyes. The deep rich green-with-just-a-hint-of-blue is her color:)
But if you're looking for a rare stone that's also pretty, and will certainly hold its value, try taaffeite Several of these gems have been found, as has a location for low-grade, not gem grade, material, but to date the source of gem-grade taaffeite remains undiscovered. It's far too rare to be used as a major source of terrorism funding:)
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Actually, yes. Believe mne, being there and doing it was far, far better than just telling about it *mwahahaha*
;)
Though, on another note, for all those geeky guys - you think watching a video of a pile of five women making love to each other would be fun, you really need to *be* one of those five women to really grok "fun"
This wasn't a Valentine's Day thingie, but a First Anniversary thing. I suspect it'll work for Valentine's Day too :)
... and, barring Alzheimer's, it's something that she'll never lose :)
My partner, Vikki, loves lobster. Can't get enough of it, in fact. So when I saw a 2-pound cold-water lobster tail, frozen, at the store, I bought it. Thawed, broiled it myself, basting it every three minutes with clarified butter and fresh-squeezed lemon juice, then served it to her on a very large plate, with a small bowl of peas (she likes canned peas. Go figure).
She ate until she could hold no more, and the next day she sliced up the leftover lobster and made a lobster sandwich. She still talks about this, fourteen years later.
Yeah, rocks are nice, but something truely memorable in the kitchen can be even nicer. Expensive as this was, it sure was cheaper than a decent diamond ring
Another idea, for later on, is to use some Moritz's "Ice Cubes" in the bedroom. They are very tasty, and melt just like tanning butter *GRIN* I know that I ruined one grrlfriend for life when I smeared some on her backside, then kissed and licked it off, telling her that she'll never again be able to tell somebody to "Kiss my *ss!" without thinking of me *WEG*
Are you going to try and convince me now that the 1s and 0s that make up your bank account are not property because they exist as money only due to government regulation and you can't stick a fork in them? How about transferring it to me then!!??!
Sure, how about if I transfer, from my account to yours, the 1s and 0s that represent -1000000 dollars? *GRINS*
Owning "intellectual property" is like owning the wind. Once an idea is manifested, it can no longer be owned, as anybody who saw it, heard it, touched it, can now use it and even improve upon it, without depriving you of anything. All our laws are trying to do is encourage people to be creative, to innovate and thus advance the well-being of all our society. Big monied interests have been trying to use these laws to make more money, as is their obligation under capitalism. Eventually, though, the roof *will* fall in on them, and what emerges from the chaos afterwards will be a radically different world.
I'm a small-scale jewelry artist. I create items that I consider beautiful, and sometimes sell them, or just give them away. The designs are, by current thinking, my "property", but I don't care. I create for *me*, and once an item has been created, duplicating it endlessly becomes a chore, keeping me from doing any more creative work. So, to stay creative, I refuse to "protect" my "property" by hiring lawyers to fight anybody whose designs look similar to mine. My muse freely gave the ideas to me, and I freely share them with the world.
What goes around, comes around.
Often listed on labels as "natural flavors", MSG is found in seaweeds, and it makes things taste much better. Unfortunately, too much MSG can backfire - it makes things taste great, but for many hours afterward, I get extreme heartburn :(
As many prepared foods use "natural flavors", it makes shopping more than a bit of a chore, in that I need to read *all* that tiny print of "ingredients", on everything I buy. Grrrr. And all this stems from a childhood spent eating cheap food flavored with Accent, which is mostly MSG.
You go through school, going deep into debt, to learn the trade. You get a job, where they work your nuggies off, for a "salary" that's laughable in hourly terms. Then, after ten years struggle, you're either RIFfed, or, if you're darned "lucky", they'll "reward" you by taking away the only thing that made the job even tolerable - you'll become a low-level manager, and never again be permitted to dirty your fingers typing in code.
Thanks, I'll take a pass on IT as a career. In many ways, I'm glad that I came down with MS *before* I got RIFfed, as it has allowed me the time to realize that my "career" had cost me my health, my social life, and one of the things that I enjoyed most - the joy of crafting a well-thought-out and well-executed program with my own two hands.
Pension? Get real! To get that, you have to stay in one company for ages. Fat chance of that, with companies dropping like flies all the time.
No, you might actually be better off if you skipped school, and stuck with your "You want fries with that?" menial job. At least you'd have some semblance of a life with that, and after paying off the student loan that allowed you to join the exciting and fast-paced world of IT, I'm not so sure that you wouldn't actually be ahead financially, too.
Um, Washington has no income tax, and its budget is in terrible shape. Could be our illustrious elected officials, true, but the point is, just not having a progressive income tax is not the only way to have a screwed-up economy during a depression.
As a woman who was in the IT field ("senior software engineer", until I became disabled), I can understand why few women would want to become involved. The hours were horrible, the pay sucked, and I routinely saw men ignoring whatever women had to say about the project. Plus, given the last item, men got all the promotions to management, and more money, while the women were allowed to bring them coffee.
During my tenure at the company, we had 4 women who worked there. Three of us left, and the 4th only kept her job by boffing the boss at lunch. This is *not* the kind of environment that women find "inviting". Small wonder why few women are inclined to get into this field. It's just not worth the trouble.
Yes, it's great, isn't it? Even a cheapskate like me can afford a huge drive now. I vividly recall back when I was able to find a Miniscribe 3650, 40mb, for $400. Wow! Nowadays, anything less than 40gb isn't worth looking at.
:) Goddess, the fun of shopping for a controller card that could support a 1:1 interleave, and fine-tuning the system's skew factor to really max out performance. Even better, grab an RLL controller, and turn the 40mb into 60! Way cool :)
:)
We stuffed that 3650 in Igloo, running Microport Unix., and went to town
Ahh, the fun times back then
I'm sure that I can remember things further back than this - stuff like walking, crying, toys, butterflies, lightningbugs and so on - but my first really vivid memory was of learning to read.
:) Then, suddenly one afternoon, the letters on the page coalesced into *words*, and I was able to really *read* them!
:)
:)
Up till that point, I had memorized all the "childrens' books" that we had, and was quite able to "read" them back again, even if the book was upside-down, or if I had my eyes closed
I ran all over the house, reading the book to my mom, my dad, and anybody else I saw. It was the most amazing thing I have ever discovered, before or since
That began a life-long infatuation with books. I wore out countless batteries reading, by flashlight, under the covers at night. I read whole encyclopedias, dictionaries and thesauruses, but my favorite books as a child were the "How and Why" books that explained science and technology. Small wonder why I grew up to be an engineer
Ummmm, excuse me, but if you're a contractor, and I hire you to write something, that's a work for hire. Unless we both agree that I cannot disseminate the stuff that I paid for, it's *mine*.
Yes, you put that bit in your contract, and that's ok. It means that we both agreed to it. However, *I* would never hire *you*, with that in the contract. I wish you well - and when I see you on the corner, holding a piece of cardboard looking for spare change, I'll just smile and walk on. If *I* hire somebody to do something for me, I sure as heck will own it afterwards, and I'll be able to do with it what I want.
As for the "free software, paid documentation", I'd suggest actually *reading* the source code, and writing your own documentation for it. Then you can freely disseminate *that*, and laugh at trhe silly people who are trying to shake users down for the documentation. But then, that's just me, being obnoxious
A few years back, there was a small study done that showed a different source of pluripotent stem cells - the nose. It seems that stem cells in the nasal cavity are already adept at becoming nerve cells.
I don't recall hearing of any follow-up to this, though it seemed very promising. I try to follow these things, as they offer a good chance of reversing the damage done to me by (secondary progressive) multiple sclerosis.
I've been hoping that such research might offer a way of reversing the damage done, in time that my skill set as a software engineer (microcontrollers and device drivers) would still be useful as anything but a curiosity, but *sigh* things don't look good. If I'm extremely lucky, it'll be only about 15 years till the technology is there, and by then, who'd want to hire a 60-year-old engineer who's been out of circulation foir the past two decades? Grrrr.
It'd be rather like a large helium-filled balloon, tethered, with a 5-watt 2M rig and a TNC, possibly powered by a battery/solar cell combination. Put a bunch of these up, and you've got it (albeit slow as heck).
:) Just like Field Day, all year long.
Now, make it a dual-band unit, and run it much faster than a normal TNC. Have the up and downlinks to the subscribers on one channel, and the "between units" link on another one. That should help the speed, and allow for greater coverage as well.
I think it'd be fun
I had a cornea transplant over a decade ago. I was given some prednisolone acetate (I think) drops to use for several weeks, but after that was over, I had no further drugs.
I'm still alive. Maybe it's not *all* transplants, or *all* drugs, that might have the problem? Though I'd rather suspect that a full face transplant would likely be major enough to need major drugs.
Yes, I *can* whack and remove most spam without ever opening it. That's not the point. I don't want to ***EVER*** see it, period. I am SOOOOO utterly sick of ads to "add 1 to three inches to your penis", and "the best teen hardcore site" and "real rape" sites and great places to buy Viagra without a prescription, and great mortgage rates, and ... and ... and .... I. No. Longer. Want. To. See. Them. Ever.
Anything that allows me to filter out *some* of it is no longer enough. I want a "white list", a client that says "only accept email from these trusted friends, and tell everybody else that I died."
What will allow this?
Back in the bad old days of packet radio, there was a thing called a "bud list". By adding somebody's callsign to the list, you could either never allow him/her to connect to you at all, or *only* allow those on your bud list to connect to you.
... and she checks her email every few days. Yikes! She needs this "white list" ability even more than I do!
I've been looking for this ability in an email program for a while. If you're on my list, you get through. If not, the mail gets bounced back as though my account had ceased to exist.
I "only" get some 40 spam messages a day now. Just yesterday, a friend complained that she is getting some 180 spam messages a day
So, what email clients have this???
A long time ago, I worked for a very small place that sold integrated systems for vertical markets. It was *small* - just myself and the owner, and when the day came that the owner started using the phrases "cash flow difficulties" and "your paycheck" in the same sentence, I promptly found other employment.
... err, "customers", yeah, that's the word :) who had bought the systems we sold, but that one place had copped a major attitude.
For several months after the company folded, the customers called me to come out and fix their systems. Most of the customers were very good about it, and I was happy to be able to help them. One place, though, was a real bear.
To start with, they had bought the computers from somebody else, who never bothered with the software. The machines were constantly doing the crash-n-burn thing, and the shoddy software that my boss wrote didn't help things much. They were also in a rather bad neighborhood, one where a single white girl was decidedly not safe after dark. Lastly, they were going through bankruptcy too, so they had zero money to pay for anything.
So, given these, they had the gall to call and *demand* that I drive into the city, during rush hour, to fix their system. As for payment, they were not going to pay me at all - I guess they figured that the pitiful salary that I had made while working for my boss was plenty enough.
I tried, too, really I did. After spending about 2 hours to get past the first tollbooth en route in, I gave up, took the first exit, and then spent another two hours driving home. I had no problem with helping the other poor dumb suckers
Needless to say, I never heard from them again, thankfully.
I always wanted them both, but never had the cash. By the time I had the cash, they were gone :(
The setting is not too distant. Mankind has moved from just the Earth, colonizing asteroids, moons and other planets in the system. Along with this spread, mankind is discovering that there are a few genes on the human genome that are of, well, alien origin.
Things get interesting. The ship's captain, Dante Montana, is searching for his child, abducted years ago by raiders. His neice, Percy, is the engineer, such as it is, on the ship. Luc is the other human crew member, and the computer rounds off the complement.
I've seen three and a half episodes thus far, and it looks rather good. Check them out, but beware, the listed "start time" is usually wrong (here in Seattle, it starts at 11:05 Saturday night).
I'm a regular eBay buyer. I buy gem material, and ancient coins. I'd been having pretty good luck for the past three years, only getting a few items that were, arguably, not as good as described. However, in the last 6 months, things have changed, possibly due to the economy going sour.
I've seen the "shipping and handling" charges skyrocket, from about $3 on average before to over $5 now, sometimes hitting over $10 for something that could be sent UPS for $3. I've bought stuff that was mis-identified, and had a biatch of a time trying to get a dime back from the sellers. I've even had flat-out fraud - one seller took my money, and that of several other people, then voluntarily suspended his registration, so I cannot even warn future (like, six months from now) victims.
EBay used to provide a service, "Safe Harbour", to help mediate in these affairs. Recently, however, the FAQ on what to do about fraud has changed, and it's now totally out of eBay's hands. I've tried calling the seller who took my money and ran, to no avail. It's been consistantly either busy, or no answer. I did a reverse-lookup on the phone number, and it doesn't even belong to the seller.
I'm just out the $20, I guess. EBay doesn't care. PayPal doesn't care. And, as long as people can get a new email account from Hotmail and Yahoo, they'll be able to do this. And, as long as the per-person bit is small, fraudsters will continue getting away with it.
I no longer feel safe unless I'm buying from a seller with ***lots*** of feedback. Perhaps one way eBay could help prevent this sort of fraud would be to require a real email account, not some cheesy Web-based freebie. Perhaps they need to verify address information - make registration cost a dollar, then snail-mail them a temporary password. However, though either approach would help deter fraudsters, both would cut down on eBay's revenue while increasing their costs, so I really don't see it changing soon. What may help force the change is if more buyers just stopped buying things. When eBay's bottom line begins to suffer, *then* we'll see a real change take place. Until then, caveat emptor.
So, you really want ultraviolet. Just barely into that range will work.
Try here for high-powered short-wave UV LEDs.
?Oops, got distracted by a cat and forgot the URL for UV LEDs. Here it is.">Try here. Just under half-way down the page.
I was looking for these earlier today - not for jamming Big Brother, but for use in a display of color-change gem materials. Most gem materials change fine under fluorescent light, but some work better between 395 and 400nm, which these LEDs will cover admirably.
While I was in high school (1974-1978), we used various HP minicomputers, timeshared. Along about '76-ish, there was a multi-person chat program called TALK, using the HP2000 Access's PFA / MWA (program/file access and multiple write access) to communicate between users via a file.
:) I wrote a cheesy knockoff, called SPACE, on my Schaumburg High account, S-350.
:)
:) They actually also helped get many people into computers, well before they were commonplace items. Heck, as I told Matk Benson, my best HS buddy, when his brother Pat enrolled in a programming class, "Geez, will you look at that! Now every idiot and his brother are getting into computers!" *GRIN*
Not long after that, Ray Zeubler, a music student at WRHarper Junior College, started writing KINGDOM, a multi-user DnD-ish game. It was rather popular, and accounted for many boxes of paper on those old DECWriters and ASR-33s
Out of high school, I eventually ended up working as a terminal aide at Harper. Ray graduated, and Kingdom went away, so I took Space, and re-vamped it into a Kingdom clone, running from my new T-920 account. This time, though, we used up barrels of electrons, playing it on faster CRTs
Somewhere along in here, Steve Woolfson wrote a version of Empire for the HP, but it never seemed to catch on like the Plato version did.
Eventually, I left Harper, for a career as a software engineer. Far as I know, Space, Kingdom (both Ray's and mine), Empire, Talk, all of those died. All were rather fun, and all wasted great piles of CPU time and disk space
Is it spam or not?
Is the haiku in the text?
Either way, it's spam
Actually, my partner Vikki was not at all interested in a diamond. She doesn't find them attractive. What she wanted was a top-grade emerald, which is more beautiful in her eyes. The deep rich green-with-just-a-hint-of-blue is her color :)
:)
But if you're looking for a rare stone that's also pretty, and will certainly hold its value, try taaffeite Several of these gems have been found, as has a location for low-grade, not gem grade, material, but to date the source of gem-grade taaffeite remains undiscovered. It's far too rare to be used as a major source of terrorism funding