i wonder how much of the motivation of it is also to get em while they are young. you figure most kids who have parents that use computers at work are running M$ products. *most* people seem to think M$ products are good (yeah i know, stay with me). with Xbox, they get young kids hooked on M$ in general, and parents probably figure "i bought that damn Sega Saturn and they went belly up, M$ isn't going anywhere".
Yeah, and then mom/dad comes home and tells the kid they'll buy him an XBox. The kid says "but I wanted a PS 2, the games are better!" The parents realize that the PS2 is made by Sony, who isn't going anywhere, costs the same, and that "We have people at work who are always fixing the computers, but our Sony TV never breaks, Sony must be better at this."
And even if they do buy the XBox, MS just lost money on the sale, and the average console buyer won't buy enough games for them to make it up. MS was selling the XBox at a loss *before* the recent price cut, now they're losing their shirt on each sale.
And I was awfully confused for a bit. I come home and open up the mail and think "Who the hell is "Interland" and why are they trying to charge me for domain renewal." I was real close to calling my actual registrar and asking if they changed their name (and why they were trying to move my nameservers) when it hit me that this was the DNS equivalent of "slamming".
I then got *very* irate. (and my roomate was forced to hear me rant about deceptive buisness practices for 20 minutes.) I came very close to calling Interland myself and accusing them of fraud, but decided against it, as it I'm sure they wouldn't have listened.
So what, exactly, gives you the right to deny them of funds like that? Now if you simply close the ad and don't click on it, thats one thing, but to never view it....
It's a essentially prequel, and is supposed to be based on Frank Miller's "Batman: Year One" comic books.
I'm particularly interested in it becuase Darren Aronofsky is directing. I would expect it to have a darker feel to it, like the original Batman movie.
Think spyware which harvests every single email address that crosses your computer. Everything from web pages you visit to emails you send and recieve. Viruses have used this technique, why not spy/marketingware?
Of course, I do concider this evil, and would rather beat my head into a brick wall than code something like that.
What's stopping them? Nothing, other than they see no financial reason do to so. Private enterprise already launches satellites. (Which they wouldn't even know how to do without the government money spent on the space program back in the 60's.)
Another typical flaw with miniarchism libertarianism. They don't seem to realize that not everything has immediate financial benifits, and that companies look for quick profits, not for the long term.
Who argues that the Internet is not a good thing? Yet if the governemnt hadn't done the original research, and created the original network, today our "internet" would be competeing prorietary online services, with no way to communicate with each other.
We've got things more interesting than that going on. How about the fact that due to jail overcrowding, we're letting prostitutes and pot smokers off with just a ticket?
Wrong, wrong, wrong.... I am *so* tired of hearing this.
You see, it's a THEORY, in the same vain that creationism is a theory.
Creationism is *not* a theory. It is not testable. It is not falsifiable. It is not predictive. There is no such thing as a "Scientific Theory of Creationism." Ask any long-time poster to talk.origins. They've been asking for one for years, and noone's ever offered one up that meets the actual criteria of being a theory.
I'm a looter. And I'm not ashamed to admit it. See, I depend on the police to protect me from getting my hard-earned money stolen when I take it to the bank. A bank that I know I'll be able to get my money back out of thanks to the FDIC. I know if my apartment complex catches on fire, the Fire Department will show up to try and put the fire out. When I eat meat, I know it's been inspected by the USDA. I drive to and from my high-paying job on roads maintained by the government of the city I live in. The reason why I had the knowledge to get the job is because I was educated at a public school, and a state-run university. (which I paid for with government-secured student loans) And I'm able to use the Internet to post this, thanks to the government research done developing it.
So yes, I'm a looter. And if you've ever take advantage of similar benfits, you're a looter too.
I am writing to you on behalf of my client, the Fishing Industry Association of America. (FIAA) My client is higly concerned that your new method for growing fish chunks in the laboratory infringes on their buisness method patent for "a process for making human-consumable foodstuffs from biological material of aquatic origin."
We fear that your new technique is also a circumvention device under the DMCA. We can not allow you to continue to develop this "biological crowbar" which infringes on our intellectual property rights. Please cease and desist from this reseach, and turn over all material related to this research to my client, or we will be forced to take more serious action.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
John Dewey, Senior Partner and lead council for the FIAA. Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe, Attorneys at law.
Whim of the sysadmin that particular day (Smeghead)
Heh. That's pretty much how a company I used to work for wound up with a FreeBSD box named 'ntsucks'. It was a NAT/ipf/Squid proxy that replaced a troublesome NT machine that servers the same function. Higher-ups later made the guy that did it change the name, so our remote logins to customer boxen didn't come from ntsucks.company.com.
Gilmore, a life member of the Libertarian party, has accused Verio of censorship and said he configured the mail server to accept and forward e-mail from anyone in part so that friends could use it while traveling around the world.
Gilmore isn't as much of a Libertarian as he thinks. After all, Verio owns the network, a good Libertarian would say that they have the right to refuse service from anyone, and that it's not censorship since they are a private entity. Sounds to me like Gilmore is trying to "coerce" Verio into providing him service. Not very Libertarian at all.
I spend a lot of time trying to get applications to allow me to select just what I want instead of what it wants. And, that's just one little time killer out of many.
Oh Jesus, this is my *number one* pet peeve *ever* about Windows. The amount of time I have wasted in my life trying to get the @#$%&* OS to select what *I* want rather than what some MS programmer *thinks* I want. I've never wanted to put my fist through a monitor more than when dealing with this.
I have *never* understood these claims that if Hollywood put movies online everyone would run out and get broadband. Last I checked, the vast majority of households in America already had access to a technology that does a great job "streaming video to the home" called freaking cable TV.
The only advantage I could see on the Internet is watching what you want on demand. Welll, my cable system is practuically there now. I can order PPV movies with my remote control. I'm sure I will be eventually able to just order what I want. The PPV systems already have Macrovision, so they have the MPAA's precious copy protection. (even though it is easily defeatable)
I hear this assertion that online movies will "save" broadband constantly, and never once have I heard a coherent argument about how it would be any more compelling than PPV Cable TV.
It's a well known fact that DSL is just second rate to cable. The ill-informed DSL guys will tell you how great it is and all, a nice dedicated connection - but they won't tell you it's dedicated to the switch.
And the fact that a DSL provider knows how many customers they have on a switch, and what speeds they have, allows them to better plan the back-end infrastructure. Yeah, I'll grant not all DSL providers actually have a large enough back-end for all their customers, but the good ones will.
If I had cable, and I saturated my line 24/7, Time Warner or Comcast (the cable companies in my area) would be on me in a heartbeat. However, my DSL contract allows me to use what I am paying for. I'm paying for 768K DSL, and I can use it. Contstantly, if I so choose.
Cable on the other hand is not regulated meaning they have don't have to open their systems for shit. They generally provide better service anyway.
This is the exact problem with cable. They don't have to open their lines, thus they don't have to compete. No incentive to provide good prices or service. If DSL went away tomorrow, watch how fast the cable companies would clamp down on what you can do with your connection, and rachet up the price. As for better service, several of my friends' experience with Comcast says otherwise. Mail servers that don't work, connections that go down, and support that doesn't have a clue.
In a 2001 Newsweek report it stated that the DSL market has shruken nearly a staggering 14% in one year, 9% of that in the last quarter alone.
When you have ILECs with the power to strangle out 3rd party providers , yeah, the market will decrease as these companies go bankrupt. But, if there was stricter accountability of ILECs when they pull crap like many have detailed in other posts to this story, these companies would have a better chance to survive.
You say you don't like PPPoE. Well, neither do I. But, right now it's my ILEC (SBC-Ameritech) that uses PPPoE, where my 3rd party provider (Speakeasy/Covad) does not.
SBC doesn't offer any packages anywhere near what I get through Speakeasy, with multiple static IPs, SDSL, a TOS that allows me to run servers, no PPPoE, and a reasonable price. If the ILECs aren't even going to offer the services I want, I certainly don't want them as the only DSL provider in my area.
How difficult is it to understand that competition benefits the consumer? It's only one of the most basic principles in economics.
The fact that she needed her staff to tell her that perpeptual copyright would violate the Consititution speaks volumes about the sorry state of our representation in congress today.
You'd think a representative would be at least required to have *read* the Consititution. I know I was required to in 11th grade government class.
I'm convinced that the Fox network execs are completely incompetant. Let's take a look:
Futurama: About to go.
Family Guy: About to go.
The Tick: Gone, and never given a chance, with one of the worst timeslots on TV, opposite "Friends" and "Survivor".
24: Possibly one of the best TV dramas *ever*, and was in danger of being pulled until it had great success with the critics and at the Golden Globes.
Titus: One of the funnier sitcoms on TV, had it's episodes cut.
Undeclared: Another decently funny show, which also had it's episodes cut. Note that the creator of this show is pissed, as Fox already screwed around with him on "Freaks and Geeks."
Grounded for Life: Another decently funny show, had it episodes cut.
Dark Angel: A show that developed a cult following in it's first season, then was moved to Friday, a night during which it's target demographic *isn't home*.
These are just off the top of my head, this season alone. I'm sure if I thought back to seasons past, I could come up with more. With how abysmal ABC's lineup is right now, you'd think they'd take advantage of it. (Yeah, I pay *way* too much attention to pop culture, so sue me.:-)
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i wonder how much of the motivation of it is also to get em while they are young. you figure most kids who have parents that use computers at work are running M$ products. *most* people seem to think M$ products are good (yeah i know, stay with me). with Xbox, they get young kids hooked on M$ in general, and parents probably figure "i bought that damn Sega Saturn and they went belly up, M$ isn't going anywhere".
Yeah, and then mom/dad comes home and tells the kid they'll buy him an XBox. The kid says "but I wanted a PS 2, the games are better!" The parents realize that the PS2 is made by Sony, who isn't going anywhere, costs the same, and that "We have people at work who are always fixing the computers, but our Sony TV never breaks, Sony must be better at this."
And even if they do buy the XBox, MS just lost money on the sale, and the average console buyer won't buy enough games for them to make it up. MS was selling the XBox at a loss *before* the recent price cut, now they're losing their shirt on each sale.
And I was awfully confused for a bit. I come home and open up the mail and think "Who the hell is "Interland" and why are they trying to charge me for domain renewal." I was real close to calling my actual registrar and asking if they changed their name (and why they were trying to move my nameservers) when it hit me that this was the DNS equivalent of "slamming".
I then got *very* irate. (and my roomate was forced to hear me rant about deceptive buisness practices for 20 minutes.) I came very close to calling Interland myself and accusing them of fraud, but decided against it, as it I'm sure they wouldn't have listened.
it must've been that wench Circuit Breaker.
Congrats, you get the "obscure pop-culture reference of the day" award. :-)
So what, exactly, gives you the right to deny them of funds like that? Now if you simply close the ad and don't click on it, thats one thing, but to never view it....
Good to see Jamie Kellner's got an account now.
Yes
It's a essentially prequel, and is supposed to be based on Frank Miller's "Batman: Year One" comic books.
I'm particularly interested in it becuase Darren Aronofsky is directing. I would expect it to have a darker feel to it, like the original Batman movie.
Think spyware which harvests every single email address that crosses your computer. Everything from web pages you visit to emails you send and recieve. Viruses have used this technique, why not spy/marketingware?
Of course, I do concider this evil, and would rather beat my head into a brick wall than code something like that.
I'll secure my own systems, thanks. I don't need the government to do it for me.
Not to mention that I don't trust them enough to stop themselves from abusing it.
What's stopping them? Nothing, other than they see no financial reason do to so. Private enterprise already launches satellites. (Which they wouldn't even know how to do without the government money spent on the space program back in the 60's.)
Another typical flaw with miniarchism libertarianism. They don't seem to realize that not everything has immediate financial benifits, and that companies look for quick profits, not for the long term.
Who argues that the Internet is not a good thing? Yet if the governemnt hadn't done the original research, and created the original network, today our "internet" would be competeing prorietary online services, with no way to communicate with each other.
I would *so* mod this up if I actually had moderator points.
We've got things more interesting than that going on. How about the fact that due to jail overcrowding, we're letting prostitutes and pot smokers off with just a ticket?
Wrong, wrong, wrong.... I am *so* tired of hearing this.
You see, it's a THEORY, in the same vain that creationism is a theory.
Creationism is *not* a theory. It is not testable. It is not falsifiable. It is not predictive. There is no such thing as a "Scientific Theory of Creationism." Ask any long-time poster to talk.origins. They've been asking for one for years, and noone's ever offered one up that meets the actual criteria of being a theory.
Secondly, evolution is both a fact and a theory.
Sorry if I'm sounding harsh, but I see these same misconceptions all the time, and they drive me crazy sometimes.
I'm a looter. And I'm not ashamed to admit it. See, I depend on the police to protect me from getting my hard-earned money stolen when I take it to the bank. A bank that I know I'll be able to get my money back out of thanks to the FDIC. I know if my apartment complex catches on fire, the Fire Department will show up to try and put the fire out. When I eat meat, I know it's been inspected by the USDA. I drive to and from my high-paying job on roads maintained by the government of the city I live in. The reason why I had the knowledge to get the job is because I was educated at a public school, and a state-run university. (which I paid for with government-secured student loans) And I'm able to use the Internet to post this, thanks to the government research done developing it.
So yes, I'm a looter. And if you've ever take advantage of similar benfits, you're a looter too.
I'm glad to see someone else had the same thought I had. Wish I had moderator points.
Dear NASA,
I am writing to you on behalf of my client, the Fishing Industry Association of America. (FIAA) My client is higly concerned that your new method for growing fish chunks in the laboratory infringes on their buisness method patent for "a process for making human-consumable foodstuffs from biological material of aquatic origin."
We fear that your new technique is also a circumvention device under the DMCA. We can not allow you to continue to develop this "biological crowbar" which infringes on our intellectual property rights. Please cease and desist from this reseach, and turn over all material related to this research to my client, or we will be forced to take more serious action.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
John Dewey, Senior Partner and lead council for the FIAA.
Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe, Attorneys at law.
Damn you and your Occam's Razor! Who said you were allowed to think here! :-)
Whim of the sysadmin that particular day (Smeghead)
Heh. That's pretty much how a company I used to work for wound up with a FreeBSD box named 'ntsucks'. It was a NAT/ipf/Squid proxy that replaced a troublesome NT machine that servers the same function. Higher-ups later made the guy that did it change the name, so our remote logins to customer boxen didn't come from ntsucks.company.com.
And the router gets to be "marajuana". Why? Cause it's the gateway drug....
Gilmore, a life member of the Libertarian party, has accused Verio of censorship and said he configured the mail server to accept and forward e-mail from anyone in part so that friends could use it while traveling around the world.
Gilmore isn't as much of a Libertarian as he thinks. After all, Verio owns the network, a good Libertarian would say that they have the right to refuse service from anyone, and that it's not censorship since they are a private entity. Sounds to me like Gilmore is trying to "coerce" Verio into providing him service. Not very Libertarian at all.
I spend a lot of time trying to get applications to allow me to select just what I want instead of what it wants. And, that's just one little time killer out of many.
Oh Jesus, this is my *number one* pet peeve *ever* about Windows. The amount of time I have wasted in my life trying to get the @#$%&* OS to select what *I* want rather than what some MS programmer *thinks* I want. I've never wanted to put my fist through a monitor more than when dealing with this.
I have *never* understood these claims that if Hollywood put movies online everyone would run out and get broadband. Last I checked, the vast majority of households in America already had access to a technology that does a great job "streaming video to the home" called freaking cable TV.
The only advantage I could see on the Internet is watching what you want on demand. Welll, my cable system is practuically there now. I can order PPV movies with my remote control. I'm sure I will be eventually able to just order what I want. The PPV systems already have Macrovision, so they have the MPAA's precious copy protection. (even though it is easily defeatable)
I hear this assertion that online movies will "save" broadband constantly, and never once have I heard a coherent argument about how it would be any more compelling than PPV Cable TV.
It's a well known fact that DSL is just second rate to cable. The ill-informed DSL guys will tell you how great it is and all, a nice dedicated connection - but they won't tell you it's dedicated to the switch.
And the fact that a DSL provider knows how many customers they have on a switch, and what speeds they have, allows them to better plan the back-end infrastructure. Yeah, I'll grant not all DSL providers actually have a large enough back-end for all their customers, but the good ones will.
If I had cable, and I saturated my line 24/7, Time Warner or Comcast (the cable companies in my area) would be on me in a heartbeat. However, my DSL contract allows me to use what I am paying for. I'm paying for 768K DSL, and I can use it. Contstantly, if I so choose.
Cable on the other hand is not regulated meaning they have don't have to open their systems for shit. They generally provide better service anyway.
This is the exact problem with cable. They don't have to open their lines, thus they don't have to compete. No incentive to provide good prices or service. If DSL went away tomorrow, watch how fast the cable companies would clamp down on what you can do with your connection, and rachet up the price. As for better service, several of my friends' experience with Comcast says otherwise. Mail servers that don't work, connections that go down, and support that doesn't have a clue.
In a 2001 Newsweek report it stated that the DSL market has shruken nearly a staggering 14% in one year, 9% of that in the last quarter alone.
When you have ILECs with the power to strangle out 3rd party providers , yeah, the market will decrease as these companies go bankrupt. But, if there was stricter accountability of ILECs when they pull crap like many have detailed in other posts to this story, these companies would have a better chance to survive.
You say you don't like PPPoE. Well, neither do I. But, right now it's my ILEC (SBC-Ameritech) that uses PPPoE, where my 3rd party provider (Speakeasy/Covad) does not.
SBC doesn't offer any packages anywhere near what I get through Speakeasy, with multiple static IPs, SDSL, a TOS that allows me to run servers, no PPPoE, and a reasonable price.
If the ILECs aren't even going to offer the services I want, I certainly don't want them as the only DSL provider in my area.
How difficult is it to understand that competition benefits the consumer? It's only one of the most basic principles in economics.
"You never even call me..."
:-)
"Why don't you ever call me..."
This song is a recurring favorite at a singalong piano bar just off-campus from Purdue University.
Of course, what do you expect from a school in Lafayette, IN.
(Note: I'm from Indiana, I still live there, I have a right to make fun of it.
The fact that she needed her staff to tell her that perpeptual copyright would violate the Consititution speaks volumes about the sorry state of our representation in congress today.
You'd think a representative would be at least required to have *read* the Consititution. I know I was required to in 11th grade government class.
I'm convinced that the Fox network execs are completely incompetant. Let's take a look:
:-)
Futurama: About to go.
Family Guy: About to go.
The Tick: Gone, and never given a chance, with one of the worst timeslots on TV, opposite "Friends" and "Survivor".
24: Possibly one of the best TV dramas *ever*, and was in danger of being pulled until it had great success with the critics and at the Golden Globes.
Titus: One of the funnier sitcoms on TV, had it's episodes cut.
Undeclared: Another decently funny show, which also had it's episodes cut. Note that the creator of this show is pissed, as Fox already screwed around with him on "Freaks and Geeks."
Grounded for Life: Another decently funny show, had it episodes cut.
Dark Angel: A show that developed a cult following in it's first season, then was moved to Friday, a night during which it's target demographic *isn't home*.
These are just off the top of my head, this season alone. I'm sure if I thought back to seasons past, I could come up with more. With how abysmal ABC's lineup is right now, you'd think they'd take advantage of it. (Yeah, I pay *way* too much attention to pop culture, so sue me.