Yes, all liberals are exactly the same. They all get together and have meetings and synchronize all their ideals. They despise individuality and they aspire to generalize about everyone who disagrees with them. That way they don't have to entertain such complex concepts as free thinking.
Let me further qualify myself. I don't know if you are a conservative, republican or what. But your response definitely indicates to me, that you are a brain dead moron. I'm talking about YOU. Not any goofball pseudo-political ideology branded by an opposing bunch of self-absorbed rednecks. Can you dig it or is that a little too complicated for your puny, closed-minded brain to comprehend?
Stop propagating the myth that liberals and Democrats want Saddam running free. That's bullshit.
If anything, it is the Republicans who have benefitted most from Saddam being in power. The Regan administration sold Hussein conventional, chemical and biological weapons and sat idly by while he mass-murdered people.
I think everybody wants to see this tyrant punished. At least the liberals don't seem to have the terminally short, hypocritical attention span that conservative/republicans do.
Fox's days of carefree spamming are past, and so is the good money. She worries that bankruptcy is just around the corner and blames the Internet companies -- who have become more adept at filtering out spam.
You can bet that this woman is a relative or trailer park neighbor of the "cajun spam gang" that's been operating in the area for awhile. I think most of them have gone out of business though.
Where you really get screwed is not the change in the technology from mag stripe to RFID. It's the banks switching you from a true credit card, to an ATM/debit account. Then you're not protected by law for the consequences of fradulent transactions.
This is just IMO FWIW but I believe RFID is one of many types of new services that really are more dangerous and insecure than they are beneficial. Technologies such as this shift the burden of responsibility from the merchant to the consumer. The big corporations have a vested interest in doing this and they engage in PR campaigns to snow-job consumers into thinking that their new products are better, when they are worse.
Here's a sampling of examples of things I'm talking about that consumers should avoid:
* RFID
Tremendous security & exploitation potential; virtually no discernable advantage to using this technology. Corporate interests claim the adoption of RFID will help reduce costs and curtail shoplifting and fraud. There is no real evidence to support this and consumers should be suspicious of this technology.
* Debit and ATM cards
Tremendous security and fraud potential. Not covered under many existing laws regarding credit card fraud. Regular credit cards are much more useful as the consumer shifts the burden to the merchant to prove a transaction was valid before paying for anything unauthorized (generally speaking but some banks have similar "consumer protections" they *claim* but credit card fraud protection is covered by Federal law). With debit cards, you lose and the burden is on you to prove the transaction is illegitimate. These are gimmicks designed to make money for the credit companies and give consumers less fraud protection. All the hype about identity and credit card theft is blown out of proportion and further used to scare consumers into, ironically, using technology that actually is less secure.
* Rebates
Misleading advertising; basically a tax on laziness. People should avoid purchasing anything that offers a rebate unless it's instant at the POS.
* Considated utility services
It's really bad to have multiple cards from the same bank, or use a single company for internet, cable and local phone service. The first time there is a billing snafu, every single one of your credit cards will be declined (if they're from the same bank - Citicorp loves to do that shit) or you lose phone, internet and cable TV if you're foolish enough to use one company for all these things.
In addition to that, there's the huge security and privacy issue of having one large company handle so many of your essential financial services and utilities. It's much more likely the information will be used against you than to enhance the quality/convenience of your life, so don't buy into the hype these companies spew about the "all on one bill convenience" they offer if you use one company for multiple services.
I am always suspicious of any new technology whose benefit isn't readily obvious to its potential market. So the value of RFID cards are that you don't "fumble" as much? That's ridiculous. Most outlets allow the customer to swipe their own credit cards, so what is the difference between holding it in front of a reader and swiping it? I know some idiots can't line up the mag stripe on their card sometimes, but do we really need a whole new technology because of that?
It's obvious where the benefit of this is: surreptitious extraction of information and account data. Sit down on a bench with a reader in it, and all your credit card data was just captured. Walk in the door of an establishment and your RFID cards are scanned and the next day you get junk mail.
I feel the same way about "debit cards". These afford the consumer less protection and security than credit cards (which are protected under the Fair Credit Billing Act of 1976) yet this new gimmick was foisted upon consumers offering more convenience. BS.
No thanks. This is not any technology that benefits consumers from any angle I can see.
Yes, it is a Konami game, but it was released for the Nintendo Super Famicon console. When I said "Nintendo", I was referring to the platform, not the publisher.
I think he could be called a "football nerd" if his obesession interefered with traditional social norms. Obviously though, the "nerd" moniker is mostly associated with complex technical things, but from what I've seen of the fantasy football enthusiasts, they can get very technical; the same could be said for baseball fans to seem to delight in drowning in a sea of statistics. That sure seems nerdy to me.
There's a long history of censorship in the video game market. I think the blood and gore is a small part of it. There's a lot of politically-incorrect content that never makes it to the states. A good example was the Nintendo shooter game Parodious, which, among other things, featured a red-white-and-blue Eagle that you had to shoot until its feathers flew off, and a collection of Vegas showgirls that spread their legs for you to fly between. Great game.
Nerds have the ultimate revenge later on, when they attend their High School reuninions, driving up in their Porches watching the fat, dumb jocks being led around by their annoying, whiny wives. The nerds have great jobs. The jocks are selling insurance or working in retail. The tables turn.
Soccer moms aren't reading Tolkien; they are attending lame, over-hyped movies.
LOTR is an epic story. The Matrix is a formulaic series of screenplays designed to show off special effects, distract the masses, and make money for corporations. The origins (and the circumstances/motivation under which they were written) of these disparate trilogies are completely different and no self-respecting nerd would lump them together.
As a proud nerd, I feel it's my obligation to point this out. LOTR is an icon of nerd'ness, but the Matrix is today's FX flavor of the week.
I do not think this is anything new. I think people misunderstand what a "nerd" really is, which is not someone that's into tech stuff, but someone who is so passionate about an interest, that they sometimes allow their obsession to interfere with more social types of behavior.
Passion has always been a main ingredient in movies, television and the media. There's nothing new about that. There are waves of certain genres of film and TV which become more and less popular, but nerd'ness isn't specifically about sci-fi or computers. Anyone who is truly passionate about something can be a "nerd."
In the Internet industry, all sorts of companies use DOS/DDOS or claims that worm-related traffic is to blame for a plethora of problems that are often internal blunders. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has ever managed a server online.
With DirecTV, the Tivo unit is $99 and $4.95/month. It would cost much more to build your own and the time you'd spend will cost you more money than the lowly fee. It just doesn't make sense to try to homebrew this application. If you want to tinker, there are tons of mods for the Tivo that give you all types of options, expansion and flexibility.
I've had my Tivo now for about two months, and like everyone else who's finally gotten one, I wondered what I ever did without it. The ability to record what I want and watch it later, along with being able to fast-forward past commercials has dramatically improved the quality of my life.
Granted, I am one of those people who generally feels television is shit, but with Tivo, you begin to realize that there are tons of shows that you like but just don't think of because you're using wading through the overwhelming noise that's currently on.
Unfortunately, I agree with you, but that's no reason to not keep trying to push the authorities to take action. If we put enough pressure on them, they will start prosecuting these people.
gotta be an easier way make money (or is spamming that easy?)
1. Spamming is NOT profitable. That is, for the most part a myth in the industry, just like the myth that anyone can chuck up an adult site and make tons of cash.
Spammers are the same dorks who would otherwise be hawking Herbalife, Shaklee or other MLM scams (and most cases still do) and are always looking for "easy money". If you notice, one of the mantras of MLM is to "look successful" and to preach to everyone else that what you're doing makes big bucks, but it almost never does. The same goes for spammers spewing crap about how rich they are. It's an illusion.
If spamming were really profitable people would stay in the business longer. They don't. If spamming were profitable, there would be lots of big companies doing it, but there isn't. Spamming is an extension of all the get-rich-quick schemes using new technology.
More than a hundred years of MLM scams still hasn't demonstrated to people that these schemes don't work, but people still buy into it? Because they're morons with short attention spans and questionable work ethics.
2. Spamming CAN be easy, which is why many morons get into it.
Many of these people creating this elaborate spam technology are likely the same nerds who would otherwise be spending a month trying to wire up a toaster to their LAN. Just because it's hi-tech doesn't mean that it's profitable or worthwhile.
3. SOME people in the spam business make money. You could say *indirectly* "spamming makes money" but like MLM, the money to be made isn't in the actual product/service, but in hoodwinking unsuspecting n00bs into thinking that the money they pay for spam services will be effective. Likewise, these spammers pay good money for network resources and programming services to augment their abilities, so some money does change hands, but for the most part, 99.9% of the spammers don't make any money, and if they do, it's really only money at the expense of stolen bandwidth and network resources so it's more like stealing that actually generating revenue.
It's not difficult to demonstrated $x amount of damage to meet their threshold. And on a civil level, you can also sue everyone the spammer promoted and use that as a vehicle to subpoena the records needed to further identify the attacker.
Not to mention all of this stuff involves major felonies. If there was any "commerce" activity on the server or network, the perpetrator also likely is in violation of the USA Patriot Act and could be considered a terrorist, with even more severe penalties.
What these people did was hugely illegal, in probably every jurisdiction they're operating. You don't need anti-spam laws. You just need the enforcement agencies to pursue criminal charges against the guy.
I hope this guy has contacted the FBI and the authorities in Germany and other areas and is pushing them to launch a full investigation so they can put this guy in a prison cell where he belongs.
I think this issue depends upon who is defining "innovation." If you define it as coming up with new ideas, history has demonstrated that almost all great innovations have been the brainchild of a single person. If you define innovation as taking someone else's early work and slapping your name on it and calling it your innovation, then yes, corporations lead the way with that brand of "innovation."
We have black boxes on planes, even in cars now. The technology obviously exists where we could have these "black boxes" in voting machines, sealed and relatively tamper-proof. Of course, if these means are left to corporations like Diebold, they'd be one-use-only-type items that would be expensive and necessary to replace for every election, whereas the open source community would undoubtedly come up with just as secure a solution that was re-useable and exponentially more economical.
The key to getting the public to care about these issues has less to do with educating them to the technology or scaring the crap out of them to "do the right thing" but instead to focus on the fact that this is taxpayer money, YOUR money that needs to be wisely spent to insure that YOUR vote is properly counted.
Every time this story comes up, I feel compelled to point out that historically, people who were on the "right" side didn't necessarily prevail over others who had more resources and money on the line.
Even though IBM is a formidible presence with plenty of resources, there are a lot of very influential, resource-rich companies whose future may depend upon the outcome of this case leaning to SCO in one form or another. Don't think we won't see a lot more counter-momentum from the Microsofts and Oracles waiting in the wings. We can't take for granted that common sense will prevail.
Continuing to poke fun at the lunacy of SCO's challenge is entertaining and helpful in endorsing the frivolity of this charge, but the tech community should also prepare for the worst and use even more of their energy to ensure that this case can be won, even under the influence of judges who may not be as objective as we hope.
In the spirit of things, I've compiled my own list of the Top 10 most amusing entries from the top 10 most "important" lists from Houston Chronicle writer, Dwight Silverman:
10. Most important places to live: #1. "Houston" 09. Most important Teletubby: #8. "Winky" 08. Most important color: #3. "Burnt Sienna" 07. Most important bathroom toiletry: #1. "Air Freshener" 06. Most important sea creature: #2. "Frog" 05. Most important car: #6. "AMC Pacer" 04. Most important medical treatment: #3. "Botox" 03. Most important spice: #1. "Fennel" 02. Most important career: #1. "Writer for Houston Chronicle" 01. Most important computer: #1. "Compaq Portable"
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Yes, all liberals are exactly the same. They all get together and have meetings and synchronize all their ideals. They despise individuality and they aspire to generalize about everyone who disagrees with them. That way they don't have to entertain such complex concepts as free thinking.
Let me further qualify myself. I don't know if you are a conservative, republican or what. But your response definitely indicates to me, that you are a brain dead moron. I'm talking about YOU. Not any goofball pseudo-political ideology branded by an opposing bunch of self-absorbed rednecks. Can you dig it or is that a little too complicated for your puny, closed-minded brain to comprehend?
Stop propagating the myth that liberals and Democrats want Saddam running free. That's bullshit.
If anything, it is the Republicans who have benefitted most from Saddam being in power. The Regan administration sold Hussein conventional, chemical and biological weapons and sat idly by while he mass-murdered people.
I think everybody wants to see this tyrant punished. At least the liberals don't seem to have the terminally short, hypocritical attention span that conservative/republicans do.
I guess Noreiga now will get a cell mate.
You can bet that this woman is a relative or trailer park neighbor of the "cajun spam gang" that's been operating in the area for awhile. I think most of them have gone out of business though.
Yes, the game is available for MAME too.
Where you really get screwed is not the change in the technology from mag stripe to RFID. It's the banks switching you from a true credit card, to an ATM/debit account. Then you're not protected by law for the consequences of fradulent transactions.
This is just IMO FWIW but I believe RFID is one of many types of new services that really are more dangerous and insecure than they are beneficial. Technologies such as this shift the burden of responsibility from the merchant to the consumer. The big corporations have a vested interest in doing this and they engage in PR campaigns to snow-job consumers into thinking that their new products are better, when they are worse.
Here's a sampling of examples of things I'm talking about that consumers should avoid:
* RFID
Tremendous security & exploitation potential; virtually no discernable advantage to using this technology. Corporate interests claim the adoption of RFID will help reduce costs and curtail shoplifting and fraud. There is no real evidence to support this and consumers should be suspicious of this technology.
* Debit and ATM cards
Tremendous security and fraud potential. Not covered under many existing laws regarding credit card fraud. Regular credit cards are much more useful as the consumer shifts the burden to the merchant to prove a transaction was valid before paying for anything unauthorized (generally speaking but some banks have similar "consumer protections" they *claim* but credit card fraud protection is covered by Federal law). With debit cards, you lose and the burden is on you to prove the transaction is illegitimate. These are gimmicks designed to make money for the credit companies and give consumers less fraud protection. All the hype about identity and credit card theft is blown out of proportion and further used to scare consumers into, ironically, using technology that actually is less secure.
* Rebates
Misleading advertising; basically a tax on laziness. People should avoid purchasing anything that offers a rebate unless it's instant at the POS.
* Considated utility services
It's really bad to have multiple cards from the same bank, or use a single company for internet, cable and local phone service. The first time there is a billing snafu, every single one of your credit cards will be declined (if they're from the same bank - Citicorp loves to do that shit) or you lose phone, internet and cable TV if you're foolish enough to use one company for all these things.
In addition to that, there's the huge security and privacy issue of having one large company handle so many of your essential financial services and utilities. It's much more likely the information will be used against you than to enhance the quality/convenience of your life, so don't buy into the hype these companies spew about the "all on one bill convenience" they offer if you use one company for multiple services.
I am always suspicious of any new technology whose benefit isn't readily obvious to its potential market. So the value of RFID cards are that you don't "fumble" as much? That's ridiculous. Most outlets allow the customer to swipe their own credit cards, so what is the difference between holding it in front of a reader and swiping it? I know some idiots can't line up the mag stripe on their card sometimes, but do we really need a whole new technology because of that?
It's obvious where the benefit of this is: surreptitious extraction of information and account data. Sit down on a bench with a reader in it, and all your credit card data was just captured. Walk in the door of an establishment and your RFID cards are scanned and the next day you get junk mail.
I feel the same way about "debit cards". These afford the consumer less protection and security than credit cards (which are protected under the Fair Credit Billing Act of 1976) yet this new gimmick was foisted upon consumers offering more convenience. BS.
No thanks. This is not any technology that benefits consumers from any angle I can see.
Yes, it is a Konami game, but it was released for the Nintendo Super Famicon console. When I said "Nintendo", I was referring to the platform, not the publisher.
I think he could be called a "football nerd" if his obesession interefered with traditional social norms. Obviously though, the "nerd" moniker is mostly associated with complex technical things, but from what I've seen of the fantasy football enthusiasts, they can get very technical; the same could be said for baseball fans to seem to delight in drowning in a sea of statistics. That sure seems nerdy to me.
There's a long history of censorship in the video game market. I think the blood and gore is a small part of it. There's a lot of politically-incorrect content that never makes it to the states. A good example was the Nintendo shooter game Parodious, which, among other things, featured a red-white-and-blue Eagle that you had to shoot until its feathers flew off, and a collection of Vegas showgirls that spread their legs for you to fly between. Great game.
Nerds have the ultimate revenge later on, when they attend their High School reuninions, driving up in their Porches watching the fat, dumb jocks being led around by their annoying, whiny wives. The nerds have great jobs. The jocks are selling insurance or working in retail. The tables turn.
The Matrix is not a nerd phoenomenon.
LOTR is.
The Matrix is a marketing phoenomenon.
Soccer moms aren't reading Tolkien; they are attending lame, over-hyped movies.
LOTR is an epic story. The Matrix is a formulaic series of screenplays designed to show off special effects, distract the masses, and make money for corporations. The origins (and the circumstances/motivation under which they were written) of these disparate trilogies are completely different and no self-respecting nerd would lump them together.
As a proud nerd, I feel it's my obligation to point this out. LOTR is an icon of nerd'ness, but the Matrix is today's FX flavor of the week.
I do not think this is anything new. I think people misunderstand what a "nerd" really is, which is not someone that's into tech stuff, but someone who is so passionate about an interest, that they sometimes allow their obsession to interfere with more social types of behavior.
Passion has always been a main ingredient in movies, television and the media. There's nothing new about that. There are waves of certain genres of film and TV which become more and less popular, but nerd'ness isn't specifically about sci-fi or computers. Anyone who is truly passionate about something can be a "nerd."
In the Internet industry, all sorts of companies use DOS/DDOS or claims that worm-related traffic is to blame for a plethora of problems that are often internal blunders. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has ever managed a server online.
With DirecTV, the Tivo unit is $99 and $4.95/month. It would cost much more to build your own and the time you'd spend will cost you more money than the lowly fee. It just doesn't make sense to try to homebrew this application. If you want to tinker, there are tons of mods for the Tivo that give you all types of options, expansion and flexibility.
I've had my Tivo now for about two months, and like everyone else who's finally gotten one, I wondered what I ever did without it. The ability to record what I want and watch it later, along with being able to fast-forward past commercials has dramatically improved the quality of my life.
Granted, I am one of those people who generally feels television is shit, but with Tivo, you begin to realize that there are tons of shows that you like but just don't think of because you're using wading through the overwhelming noise that's currently on.
Unfortunately, I agree with you, but that's no reason to not keep trying to push the authorities to take action. If we put enough pressure on them, they will start prosecuting these people.
1. Spamming is NOT profitable. That is, for the most part a myth in the industry, just like the myth that anyone can chuck up an adult site and make tons of cash.
Spammers are the same dorks who would otherwise be hawking Herbalife, Shaklee or other MLM scams (and most cases still do) and are always looking for "easy money". If you notice, one of the mantras of MLM is to "look successful" and to preach to everyone else that what you're doing makes big bucks, but it almost never does. The same goes for spammers spewing crap about how rich they are. It's an illusion.
If spamming were really profitable people would stay in the business longer. They don't. If spamming were profitable, there would be lots of big companies doing it, but there isn't. Spamming is an extension of all the get-rich-quick schemes using new technology.
More than a hundred years of MLM scams still hasn't demonstrated to people that these schemes don't work, but people still buy into it? Because they're morons with short attention spans and questionable work ethics.
2. Spamming CAN be easy, which is why many morons get into it.
Many of these people creating this elaborate spam technology are likely the same nerds who would otherwise be spending a month trying to wire up a toaster to their LAN. Just because it's hi-tech doesn't mean that it's profitable or worthwhile.
3. SOME people in the spam business make money. You could say *indirectly* "spamming makes money" but like MLM, the money to be made isn't in the actual product/service, but in hoodwinking unsuspecting n00bs into thinking that the money they pay for spam services will be effective. Likewise, these spammers pay good money for network resources and programming services to augment their abilities, so some money does change hands, but for the most part, 99.9% of the spammers don't make any money, and if they do, it's really only money at the expense of stolen bandwidth and network resources so it's more like stealing that actually generating revenue.
It's not difficult to demonstrated $x amount of damage to meet their threshold. And on a civil level, you can also sue everyone the spammer promoted and use that as a vehicle to subpoena the records needed to further identify the attacker.
Not to mention all of this stuff involves major felonies. If there was any "commerce" activity on the server or network, the perpetrator also likely is in violation of the USA Patriot Act and could be considered a terrorist, with even more severe penalties.
What these people did was hugely illegal, in probably every jurisdiction they're operating. You don't need anti-spam laws. You just need the enforcement agencies to pursue criminal charges against the guy.
I hope this guy has contacted the FBI and the authorities in Germany and other areas and is pushing them to launch a full investigation so they can put this guy in a prison cell where he belongs.
I think this issue depends upon who is defining "innovation." If you define it as coming up with new ideas, history has demonstrated that almost all great innovations have been the brainchild of a single person. If you define innovation as taking someone else's early work and slapping your name on it and calling it your innovation, then yes, corporations lead the way with that brand of "innovation."
We have black boxes on planes, even in cars now. The technology obviously exists where we could have these "black boxes" in voting machines, sealed and relatively tamper-proof. Of course, if these means are left to corporations like Diebold, they'd be one-use-only-type items that would be expensive and necessary to replace for every election, whereas the open source community would undoubtedly come up with just as secure a solution that was re-useable and exponentially more economical.
The key to getting the public to care about these issues has less to do with educating them to the technology or scaring the crap out of them to "do the right thing" but instead to focus on the fact that this is taxpayer money, YOUR money that needs to be wisely spent to insure that YOUR vote is properly counted.
Every time this story comes up, I feel compelled to point out that historically, people who were on the "right" side didn't necessarily prevail over others who had more resources and money on the line.
Even though IBM is a formidible presence with plenty of resources, there are a lot of very influential, resource-rich companies whose future may depend upon the outcome of this case leaning to SCO in one form or another. Don't think we won't see a lot more counter-momentum from the Microsofts and Oracles waiting in the wings. We can't take for granted that common sense will prevail.
Continuing to poke fun at the lunacy of SCO's challenge is entertaining and helpful in endorsing the frivolity of this charge, but the tech community should also prepare for the worst and use even more of their energy to ensure that this case can be won, even under the influence of judges who may not be as objective as we hope.
It's also worth noting that the Tandy Sensation made 4 of those top 10 lists.
In the spirit of things, I've compiled my own list of the Top 10 most amusing entries from the top 10 most "important" lists from Houston Chronicle writer, Dwight Silverman:
10. Most important places to live: #1. "Houston"
09. Most important Teletubby: #8. "Winky"
08. Most important color: #3. "Burnt Sienna"
07. Most important bathroom toiletry: #1. "Air Freshener"
06. Most important sea creature: #2. "Frog"
05. Most important car: #6. "AMC Pacer"
04. Most important medical treatment: #3. "Botox"
03. Most important spice: #1. "Fennel"
02. Most important career: #1. "Writer for Houston Chronicle"
01. Most important computer: #1. "Compaq Portable"