Technically, the camera's batteries and its packaging are disposable, but everything else is recycled, so it's more a "recyclable" than a "disposable" unit.
That should be a combo technical/market based solution, but you get the point. It won't work. It's a dumb idea.
Spammers aren't going to pay money. Spammers profit by stealing resources. It's a tremendous leap of faith to assume that any significant percentage of spammers would buy into such a boneheaded idea, but then again, coming from a college professor (who likely has very little real world business experience), it's not surprising.
This article advocates a (x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a poorly thought-out, ineffective federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it (x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries (x) Jurisdictional problems (x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam (via theft of resources) (x) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck (x) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (x) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
I think a server room that doubles as a Wine Cellar is a pretty green idea. Think of the potential... a free bottle of Cristal with every colo you purchase.
Microsoft develop an operating system with bugs which allow worms and viruses and trojans to propagate. Microsoft then continue to build an anti virus system
Welcome to the software industry. This is how it works. Most companies these days deliberately withold useful features and bug-fixes for future versions, for which they can charge additional fees.
.. but I welcome Microsoft's entry into the AV marketplace. To put it bluntly, their product cannot possibly be less efficient, more annoying and more costly than Symantec and Mcaffee's offerings.
I'm so sick of Symantec's bloated product line that I'd gladly switch, especially if this meant I could get out from under their mafia subscription scheme.
Sites like howstuffworks are stooping so low as to produce articles on How Lightsabers Work mingled among what is considered to be more credible material.
Considering how problemmatic Symantec's software has been, and how their programs have disabled the functionality of my computers moreso than from me ever being hit by spyware, I want to knew if their new product will uninstall Norton Utilities? Seriously. In many ways, Symantec's obnoxious mafia-control-payment scheme is more annoying than most spyware.
I am troubled by the decision by scientific groups to boycott these hearings. Wouldn't it be better to take these arguments on squarely and address them on the merits?
Normally, I'd agree with you, but I think that the intellectuals are taking a page from the religious zealot's handbook and choosing not to legitimize what they want to establish as a wholly ridiculous premise in the first place.
If the right wingers play into the hands of the scientists, they'll use the lack of participation as evidence of their superiority, setting themselves up for a future, higher-profile confrontation that might embarass them even more. I think it's a good idea.
It's about time the scientific community didn't come running each time the fundies jerked their chain.
Personally, I don't really see the creationists as being too much worse than that particular demographic of atheists who worship Darwin as God. *Excessive*, irrational veneration...
Thanks for providing us with a poignant example of excessive, irrational, statements. Speculating that there is any significant faction of people on this planet who, in any way, "worship Darwin as God" is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard.
If there's one thing that really annoys me, it's an intellectually deficient side's desperate attempt to compare the end of a cigarette to the surface of the sun and claim they both put out the same amount of heat and therefore negate each others' significance or severity. Intelligence insulting hogwash!
However, another group who I think desperately need to get lives are those who are frantically seeking life on Mars, purely/primarily because they hope they can use such proof to discredit creationism altogether.
Huh? Are you kidding me? Are you wearing tin-foil underwear?
I believe the best way that evolutionary advocates can win this particular battle is simply by not fighting it.
Unbelievable. You advocate not standing up for what you believe in, and this will somehow make everything rosy? Have you not studied even a sliver of history of any civilization in the world?
* If faith is such an intregal part of religion, and no amount of science or evidence is ultimately relevant, why do these people care whether or not evolution is taught one way or another in schools?
* If one is so confident in the disposition of their beliefs, why are they so desperate to discredit alternative theories?
* Isn't it suspicious that the religious right have to redefine everything around them so that it jives with their narrow view of the world? They call themselves "pro life" but this only really is true when they pervert the defition of "life" to primarily apply to fetuses and select brain dead medical patients with comprehensive insurance. Other forms of "life" don't fit their definition.
It seems to me this issue is the latest in a string of ongoing "redefinitions" that the church has continued to perpetrate, including "life", "sex", "marriage", "morality", "truth", etc. Why should anyone be surprised? It took the church 300+ years to acknowledge that the planet wasn't the center of the universe, and unfortunately, none of us would be surprised if they decided to challenge that definition... after all, it IS just a theory...
Recent headlines about our state of science and technology are backing up my theory that in the U.S. there are many people who are not intersted in progress.
I think that the country has basically abandoned science and technology, but it's not a question of whether or not they're "interested in progress."
This is an issue of the hyperactive media and its emphasis on promoting consumerism as a means to an end, competing with itself to the point where nobody can focus any more due to the plethora of mixed messages. Our society is no longer a manufacturing society; we are no longer creating things. We are slowly becoming a complete user-consumer society, and there is no place for futuristic or highly-focused thinking in this type of reactive society. As the media has positioned itself to answer all of our questions via consumerism, religion is trying to reestablish its similar foothold in society.
If our leaders made it a priority to glamorize science and technology, this would be a priority within our country, but instead, the media focuses on distractions and consumerism, and science and technology are considered uninteresting unless they're related to an episode of CSI.
While the US government is likely to blame this entire mess on the Italians, I can't help but wonder, is it their fault? Up until now perhaps, the Iraqi insurgents and other anti-American forces probably didn't have the capability or wherewithall to employ this innovative "cut and paste technology" to discover classified bits of information.
Are the Americans so jaded and naive that they think this hidden information would have only been discovered had it not been for some Italians publicizing it?
If you ask me, probably the only way to get important groups to better-secure their information, is through exposes of this nature which embarass them into changing their methods, otherwise it may very well have been just the Iraqi insurgency and a few others that, for several more years would have employed this super-secret cut-and-paste technology.
It's sad and unfortunate, but it's also pathetic and embarassing.
Most hunters are apparently more capable and better trained than the current military in Iraq. At least a hunter can recognize a doe from a buck, a boar from a turkey and avoid shooting it out of season. Examples of this show either the incompetence or the arrogance of those forces. My contention is it's the latter. But I don't blame the individual soldiers. It's their COs and the upper hierarchy that is responsible. These kids are just trying to stay alive long enough until they can get back home and be denied medical treatment. The COs are the ones who are allowing this activity to go on, and it looks like nobody important will ever be held accountable.
Actually, if you think about it, he's pulling a "Wal-Mart" on Wal-Mart by sensationalizing the legal oppression the corporation is trying to bear down on him. It's a propaganda battle; it's yet another ironic symbolism of the constant conflict between little guys and big corporations, and the little guys make up for lack of resources with ingenuity.
You're right about his legal rights, but if he simply refused to change the site, he couldn't fully capitalize on the unfair and ironic imposition of Wal-Mart's legal intimidation tactic. Brilliant move changing the site if you ask me.
From perusing the sites it's pretty interesting the stuff you find. On Wal-Mart Watch they claim 70% of the store's products come from China, and Wal-Mart's own propaganda site, Wal-Mart "Facts" their response to this is a nice right-wing style two-step:
Myth: 70 percent of the merchandise sold at our stores comes from China.
Fact: The special interest group who makes this claim doesn't tell you where it got that statistic. In actuality, Wal-Mart's business with U.S. suppliers remains strong and healthy. In 2004, Wal-Mart spent more than $137 billion for U.S. products and services sold at our stores. A single company with sales of that magnitude would rank #5 on the Fortune 500. You can count on this fact, too: The products and services from US suppliers sold at Wal-Mart stores provide good jobs to more than 3.5 million employees at 68,000 suppliers in states across America.
I'm so sick of corporate propagandist distracto-babble. If the "facts" dispute the "myth" that 70% of Wal-Mart's products don't come from China, why not say it? Why sidestep the issue, yet still call it a myth and talk about how much money you pay suppliers? Stupid, intelligence-insulting corporations.
I switched from Dotster to Godaddy after Dotster a) Started spamming me regularly, without a working opt-out b) Registered.info versions of my domains "for free" and stuck their advertisement ridden parking stuff on them.
I never had any of that happen to me. You may be thinking of some other registrar. In fact, Dotster has a very strict anti-spam policy.
If you guys think Godaddy is better than Dotster, well... I manage over 2000 domains and have worked with almost every major registrar and help customers wrestle control of domains on almost a daily basis and I can say unequivocably that Godaddy sucks - they are the ones who have a history of hijacking domains.. search for stories about "web bots" and framed redirects and nightmare stories of their customers. In fact, when a customer comes to me for hosting and he's previously dealt with Godaddy for domain registration, it's like a litmus test for trouble (as well as them being difficult to work with and clueless).
in terms of being sleazy and disreputable enough to garner more business.
Dotster is THE registrar of choice if you ask me, and they use a lot of open source software for their system. We routinely have huge problems wrestling domains from Godaddy or diagnosing problems with their system and management. Dotster has proven to be more reliable and more ethical in their operation. I've been with them for probably five years at least and am very happy. I have tons of horror stories about Godaddy. They totally suck, but this goes to show that people still seem to think you can get more than you pay for.
Of all the movies to reference technology from, Minority Report must be the worst. There were so many continuity errors in that film it would be hard to know where to begin. That movie, along with A.I. pretty much sealed Spielburg's coffin and convinced me that I'd never pay another penny to see one of his movies.
I guess in the future, when you're a powerful law enforcement officer and you're fired, they don't bother to remove your computer security codes, which is what happened with Tom Cruise's character. He's breaking back into super-secure compounds with his access codes while he's a wanted man. I especially liked the scene where he carries around an eyeball in a zip-lok bag and it still manages to activate the retinal scanners. Worst movie ever!
Hyman trashed U.N. with distortions about oil-for-food
http://mediamatters.org/items/200504140003
Sinclair Broadcast Group commentator Mark Hyman used the April 12 edition of "The Point" to attack United Nations and European leaders with false and misleading accusations regarding their involvement in corruption in the U.N. oil-for-food program.
Referring to Benon Sevan, the U.N. undersecretary who headed the oil-for-food program, Hyman opened "The Point" by stating, "Generally, if someone has found to have illegally profited at the expense of his employer, he'll at least get a good swift kick out the door if he escapes prosecution. But if you are caught at the U.N., they pay your legal fees." What Hyman failed to note is that the United Nations stopped paying the legal fees for Sevan in February, when the Independent Inquiry Committee investigation headed by Paul Volcker revealed that Sevan had personally solicited illicit oil from Iraq on behalf a small African trading company and that his actions "were ethically improper, and seriously undermined the integrity of the United Nations." Until that time, the allegations against Sevan were unsubstantiated.
Hyman further claimed: "After Operation Iraqi Freedom toppled Saddam Hussein, it was learned that the program was corrupt with officials from Europe to the U.N. profiting from off-the-books deals and kickbacks." But the United States and other members of the U.N. Security Council -- which had primary responsibility for overseeing oil-for-food -- were aware of potential oil-for-food kickbacks well before Hussein was ousted and took only minimal steps to confront the problem, apparently in order to maintain support for the sanctions regime, which had effectively thwarted Hussein's ambition to restart his weapons of mass destruction programs by denying him the necessary materials, even as Hussein found ways to gain illicit revenue.
An examination of oil-for-food corruption by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released in April 2004, stated that in March 2001 the U.S. "informed the Security Council about allegations that Iraqi government officials were receiving illegal surcharges on oil contracts and illicit commissions on commodity contracts." GAO noted that the Security Council took action on the oil contracts surcharges by implementing retroactive pricing for such contracts, but that "it is unclear what actions" were taken regarding the illicit commissions on commodities contracts.
Further, The Washington Post reported on November 14, 2004, that Edward Mortimer, communications director for the U.N. Secretary-General's office, stated that beginning in late 2001, "U.N. officials presented the sanctions committee with 70 contracts that were potentially overpriced.... But 'nobody placed a single contract on hold,' he said -- including the United States and Britain, Baghdad's toughest critics on the Security Council." In testimony before the House Government Reform Committee's subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations on April 12, Fairfield University professor Joy Gordon, who studied the U.N. sanctions against Iraq, confirmed Mortimer's assertion:
Where price irregularities were clear, the customs officers of the OIP [Office of the Iraq Program] staff did in fact inform the 661 Committee [the committee established in 1990 by U.N. Security Council Resolution 661 to monitor Iraq's compliance with sanctions], giving each member the opportunity to block the contract, or to ask for further information before approving. On over 70 occasions, this was done. On none of those occasions did any member of the Council -- including the U.S. -- seek to delay or block the contract for pricing irregularities.
Hyman also claimed that "[t]he involvement of high-ranking U.N. officials in the oil-for-food scandal may have been the deciding factor in the international body's reluctance to hold Saddam accountable for his actions," but Hyman provided no explanation for h
I'll admit that the UN is pretty damned ineffective, but this claim is totally incredible.
Ironically, the majority of the UN's problems are the DIRECT result of the United States making the organization completely incapable of accomplishing much or enforcing important humanitarian mandates.
It's funny how the U.S. criticizes the U.N. whenever the organization doesn't exclusively promote the US's agenda, and then two seconds later, after veto'ing numerous resolutions, they cite UN sanction violations as a means by which they can engage in preemptive war. And when the UN's members get upset, the U.S. calls the UN "useless" and ignores them.. until the next time the UN's agenda coincides with their own.
This would be all fine and dandy if this planet were one singular culture and nation, but it isn't. And the UN, while not perfect, is the best attempt thus far to provide a forum for the world's people to work together. It's pathetic for ignorant, small-minded people to marginalize the U.N. when they don't know much about it.
Because of so much propaganda and misinformation spreading about on the UN, educational programs like this are probably a good idea. They're no counter to the hundreds of hours of right-wing media lies being spread about the organization, but it's a start.
The UN food programme has been around for a long, long time. Are you seriously asserting that it was invented solely to divert people's attention from one (very serious) scandal?
People like that poster bathe in their ignorance and self-righteousness. They're the same idiots who keep propagating partisian myths like the "Al Gore invented the Internet" lie.
You're right, we shouldn't make fun of the laudable goal of feeding the humgry... even if it's only a diversion from the associated goal of Oil for Food kickbacks.
I was waiting for this issue to come up. You should do some research into that scandal and find out the real truth and which countries were behind it, not the least of which was under any control by the U.N. This is exactly the ignorant generalizations being spread inappropriately.
Slashdot Mirror
Technically, the camera's batteries and its packaging are disposable, but everything else is recycled, so it's more a "recyclable" than a "disposable" unit.
That should be a combo technical/market based solution, but you get the point. It won't work. It's a dumb idea.
Spammers aren't going to pay money. Spammers profit by stealing resources. It's a tremendous leap of faith to assume that any significant percentage of spammers would buy into such a boneheaded idea, but then again, coming from a college professor (who likely has very little real world business experience), it's not surprising.
This article advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a poorly
thought-out, ineffective federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam (via theft of resources)
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
I think a server room that doubles as a Wine Cellar is a pretty green idea. Think of the potential... a free bottle of Cristal with every colo you purchase.
Microsoft develop an operating system with bugs which allow worms and viruses and trojans to propagate .
Microsoft then continue to build an anti virus system
Welcome to the software industry. This is how it works. Most companies these days deliberately withold useful features and bug-fixes for future versions, for which they can charge additional fees.
.. but I welcome Microsoft's entry into the AV marketplace. To put it bluntly, their product cannot possibly be less efficient, more annoying and more costly than Symantec and Mcaffee's offerings.
I'm so sick of Symantec's bloated product line that I'd gladly switch, especially if this meant I could get out from under their mafia subscription scheme.
Sites like howstuffworks are stooping so low as to produce articles on How Lightsabers Work mingled among what is considered to be more credible material.
Considering how problemmatic Symantec's software has been, and how their programs have disabled the functionality of my computers moreso than from me ever being hit by spyware, I want to knew if their new product will uninstall Norton Utilities? Seriously. In many ways, Symantec's obnoxious mafia-control-payment scheme is more annoying than most spyware.
The game is boring.
As opposed to what? The Movie? Is that even possible? Do you have to sit there and kill the same mob 10,000 times over and over?
If you want to shape the matrix story...
1. Go online and open a merchant account.
2. Slap the matrix logo on every piece of crap you can find.
3. Profit...
That's the most substantive plotline of the Matrix.
I am troubled by the decision by scientific groups to boycott these hearings. Wouldn't it be better to take these arguments on squarely and address them on the merits?
Normally, I'd agree with you, but I think that the intellectuals are taking a page from the religious zealot's handbook and choosing not to legitimize what they want to establish as a wholly ridiculous premise in the first place.
If the right wingers play into the hands of the scientists, they'll use the lack of participation as evidence of their superiority, setting themselves up for a future, higher-profile confrontation that might embarass them even more. I think it's a good idea.
It's about time the scientific community didn't come running each time the fundies jerked their chain.
Personally, I don't really see the creationists as being too much worse than that particular demographic of atheists who worship Darwin as God. *Excessive*, irrational veneration ...
Thanks for providing us with a poignant example of excessive, irrational, statements. Speculating that there is any significant faction of people on this planet who, in any way, "worship Darwin as God" is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard.
If there's one thing that really annoys me, it's an intellectually deficient side's desperate attempt to compare the end of a cigarette to the surface of the sun and claim they both put out the same amount of heat and therefore negate each others' significance or severity. Intelligence insulting hogwash!
However, another group who I think desperately need to get lives are those who are frantically seeking life on Mars, purely/primarily because they hope they can use such proof to discredit creationism altogether.
Huh? Are you kidding me? Are you wearing tin-foil underwear?
I believe the best way that evolutionary advocates can win this particular battle is simply by not fighting it.
Unbelievable. You advocate not standing up for what you believe in, and this will somehow make everything rosy? Have you not studied even a sliver of history of any civilization in the world?
* If faith is such an intregal part of religion, and no amount of science or evidence is ultimately relevant, why do these people care whether or not evolution is taught one way or another in schools?
* If one is so confident in the disposition of their beliefs, why are they so desperate to discredit alternative theories?
* Isn't it suspicious that the religious right have to redefine everything around them so that it jives with their narrow view of the world? They call themselves "pro life" but this only really is true when they pervert the defition of "life" to primarily apply to fetuses and select brain dead medical patients with comprehensive insurance. Other forms of "life" don't fit their definition.
It seems to me this issue is the latest in a string of ongoing "redefinitions" that the church has continued to perpetrate, including "life", "sex", "marriage", "morality", "truth", etc. Why should anyone be surprised? It took the church 300+ years to acknowledge that the planet wasn't the center of the universe, and unfortunately, none of us would be surprised if they decided to challenge that definition... after all, it IS just a theory...
Recent headlines about our state of science and technology are backing up my theory that in the U.S. there are many people who are not intersted in progress.
I think that the country has basically abandoned science and technology, but it's not a question of whether or not they're "interested in progress."
This is an issue of the hyperactive media and its emphasis on promoting consumerism as a means to an end, competing with itself to the point where nobody can focus any more due to the plethora of mixed messages. Our society is no longer a manufacturing society; we are no longer creating things. We are slowly becoming a complete user-consumer society, and there is no place for futuristic or highly-focused thinking in this type of reactive society. As the media has positioned itself to answer all of our questions via consumerism, religion is trying to reestablish its similar foothold in society.
If our leaders made it a priority to glamorize science and technology, this would be a priority within our country, but instead, the media focuses on distractions and consumerism, and science and technology are considered uninteresting unless they're related to an episode of CSI.
While the US government is likely to blame this entire mess on the Italians, I can't help but wonder, is it their fault? Up until now perhaps, the Iraqi insurgents and other anti-American forces probably didn't have the capability or wherewithall to employ this innovative "cut and paste technology" to discover classified bits of information.
Are the Americans so jaded and naive that they think this hidden information would have only been discovered had it not been for some Italians publicizing it?
If you ask me, probably the only way to get important groups to better-secure their information, is through exposes of this nature which embarass them into changing their methods, otherwise it may very well have been just the Iraqi insurgency and a few others that, for several more years would have employed this super-secret cut-and-paste technology.
It's sad and unfortunate, but it's also pathetic and embarassing.
Most hunters are apparently more capable and better trained than the current military in Iraq. At least a hunter can recognize a doe from a buck, a boar from a turkey and avoid shooting it out of season. Examples of this show either the incompetence or the arrogance of those forces. My contention is it's the latter. But I don't blame the individual soldiers. It's their COs and the upper hierarchy that is responsible. These kids are just trying to stay alive long enough until they can get back home and be denied medical treatment. The COs are the ones who are allowing this activity to go on, and it looks like nobody important will ever be held accountable.
Actually, if you think about it, he's pulling a "Wal-Mart" on Wal-Mart by sensationalizing the legal oppression the corporation is trying to bear down on him. It's a propaganda battle; it's yet another ironic symbolism of the constant conflict between little guys and big corporations, and the little guys make up for lack of resources with ingenuity.
You're right about his legal rights, but if he simply refused to change the site, he couldn't fully capitalize on the unfair and ironic imposition of Wal-Mart's legal intimidation tactic. Brilliant move changing the site if you ask me.
I'm so sick of corporate propagandist distracto-babble. If the "facts" dispute the "myth" that 70% of Wal-Mart's products don't come from China, why not say it? Why sidestep the issue, yet still call it a myth and talk about how much money you pay suppliers? Stupid, intelligence-insulting corporations.
I switched from Dotster to Godaddy after Dotster a) Started spamming me regularly, without a working opt-out b) Registered .info versions of my domains "for free" and stuck their advertisement ridden parking stuff on them.
I never had any of that happen to me. You may be thinking of some other registrar. In fact, Dotster has a very strict anti-spam policy.
If you guys think Godaddy is better than Dotster, well... I manage over 2000 domains and have worked with almost every major registrar and help customers wrestle control of domains on almost a daily basis and I can say unequivocably that Godaddy sucks - they are the ones who have a history of hijacking domains.. search for stories about "web bots" and framed redirects and nightmare stories of their customers. In fact, when a customer comes to me for hosting and he's previously dealt with Godaddy for domain registration, it's like a litmus test for trouble (as well as them being difficult to work with and clueless).
in terms of being sleazy and disreputable enough to garner more business.
Dotster is THE registrar of choice if you ask me, and they use a lot of open source software for their system. We routinely have huge problems wrestling domains from Godaddy or diagnosing problems with their system and management. Dotster has proven to be more reliable and more ethical in their operation. I've been with them for probably five years at least and am very happy. I have tons of horror stories about Godaddy. They totally suck, but this goes to show that people still seem to think you can get more than you pay for.
Of all the movies to reference technology from, Minority Report must be the worst. There were so many continuity errors in that film it would be hard to know where to begin. That movie, along with A.I. pretty much sealed Spielburg's coffin and convinced me that I'd never pay another penny to see one of his movies.
I guess in the future, when you're a powerful law enforcement officer and you're fired, they don't bother to remove your computer security codes, which is what happened with Tom Cruise's character. He's breaking back into super-secure compounds with his access codes while he's a wanted man. I especially liked the scene where he carries around an eyeball in a zip-lok bag and it still manages to activate the retinal scanners. Worst movie ever!
Hyman trashed U.N. with distortions about oil-for-food
... But 'nobody placed a single contract on hold,' he said -- including the United States and Britain, Baghdad's toughest critics on the Security Council." In testimony before the House Government Reform Committee's subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations on April 12, Fairfield University professor Joy Gordon, who studied the U.N. sanctions against Iraq, confirmed Mortimer's assertion:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200504140003
Sinclair Broadcast Group commentator Mark Hyman used the April 12 edition of "The Point" to attack United Nations and European leaders with false and misleading accusations regarding their involvement in corruption in the U.N. oil-for-food program.
Referring to Benon Sevan, the U.N. undersecretary who headed the oil-for-food program, Hyman opened "The Point" by stating, "Generally, if someone has found to have illegally profited at the expense of his employer, he'll at least get a good swift kick out the door if he escapes prosecution. But if you are caught at the U.N., they pay your legal fees." What Hyman failed to note is that the United Nations stopped paying the legal fees for Sevan in February, when the Independent Inquiry Committee investigation headed by Paul Volcker revealed that Sevan had personally solicited illicit oil from Iraq on behalf a small African trading company and that his actions "were ethically improper, and seriously undermined the integrity of the United Nations." Until that time, the allegations against Sevan were unsubstantiated.
Hyman further claimed: "After Operation Iraqi Freedom toppled Saddam Hussein, it was learned that the program was corrupt with officials from Europe to the U.N. profiting from off-the-books deals and kickbacks." But the United States and other members of the U.N. Security Council -- which had primary responsibility for overseeing oil-for-food -- were aware of potential oil-for-food kickbacks well before Hussein was ousted and took only minimal steps to confront the problem, apparently in order to maintain support for the sanctions regime, which had effectively thwarted Hussein's ambition to restart his weapons of mass destruction programs by denying him the necessary materials, even as Hussein found ways to gain illicit revenue.
An examination of oil-for-food corruption by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released in April 2004, stated that in March 2001 the U.S. "informed the Security Council about allegations that Iraqi government officials were receiving illegal surcharges on oil contracts and illicit commissions on commodity contracts." GAO noted that the Security Council took action on the oil contracts surcharges by implementing retroactive pricing for such contracts, but that "it is unclear what actions" were taken regarding the illicit commissions on commodities contracts.
Further, The Washington Post reported on November 14, 2004, that Edward Mortimer, communications director for the U.N. Secretary-General's office, stated that beginning in late 2001, "U.N. officials presented the sanctions committee with 70 contracts that were potentially overpriced.
Where price irregularities were clear, the customs officers of the OIP [Office of the Iraq Program] staff did in fact inform the 661 Committee [the committee established in 1990 by U.N. Security Council Resolution 661 to monitor Iraq's compliance with sanctions], giving each member the opportunity to block the contract, or to ask for further information before approving. On over 70 occasions, this was done. On none of those occasions did any member of the Council -- including the U.S. -- seek to delay or block the contract for pricing irregularities.
Hyman also claimed that "[t]he involvement of high-ranking U.N. officials in the oil-for-food scandal may have been the deciding factor in the international body's reluctance to hold Saddam accountable for his actions," but Hyman provided no explanation for h
I'll admit that the UN is pretty damned ineffective, but this claim is totally incredible.
Ironically, the majority of the UN's problems are the DIRECT result of the United States making the organization completely incapable of accomplishing much or enforcing important humanitarian mandates.
It's funny how the U.S. criticizes the U.N. whenever the organization doesn't exclusively promote the US's agenda, and then two seconds later, after veto'ing numerous resolutions, they cite UN sanction violations as a means by which they can engage in preemptive war. And when the UN's members get upset, the U.S. calls the UN "useless" and ignores them.. until the next time the UN's agenda coincides with their own.
This would be all fine and dandy if this planet were one singular culture and nation, but it isn't. And the UN, while not perfect, is the best attempt thus far to provide a forum for the world's people to work together. It's pathetic for ignorant, small-minded people to marginalize the U.N. when they don't know much about it.
Because of so much propaganda and misinformation spreading about on the UN, educational programs like this are probably a good idea. They're no counter to the hundreds of hours of right-wing media lies being spread about the organization, but it's a start.
The UN food programme has been around for a long, long time. Are you seriously asserting that it was invented solely to divert people's attention from one (very serious) scandal?
People like that poster bathe in their ignorance and self-righteousness. They're the same idiots who keep propagating partisian myths like the "Al Gore invented the Internet" lie.
You're right, we shouldn't make fun of the laudable goal of feeding the humgry... even if it's only a diversion from the associated goal of Oil for Food kickbacks.
I was waiting for this issue to come up. You should do some research into that scandal and find out the real truth and which countries were behind it, not the least of which was under any control by the U.N. This is exactly the ignorant generalizations being spread inappropriately.