When I moved here, I wanted to get a Safeway store card. No problem, they said - here's the card, return this form after you fill it out, here's your groceries, have a nice day.
I took the form home, and it got lost. No, not deliberately, though I have no incentive to look for it now. I have found the form a few times, and have thought about returning it so I can start to get air miles, but they aren't for the 3 airline programs I am already in, so there's not much point. Even though my receipts all say "new customer" on them, I still get the discounts, and the system still racks up special discounts for me when I buy over a certain amount in a month.
They can still use my purchasing data in aggregate form, you see - they know that somewhere there's a person, probably a single white geeky male, who buys low fat and health foods, but then also binges on chips and dingdongs every other month. They can offer me coupons based upon the brands they know I buy, without having to verify my demographics. It's all pretty cool. I don't mind being "targeted" in this fashion, either; if I already use the stuff, why not?
The problem with 7-Eleven is that the "Gulp" really should be called the "Small Gulp".
What's a small gulp? Isn't that like a sip?
I've always been confused by the fact that they used a measurement of speed instead of size, anyway. Gulping your drink down means to drink it fast, not necessarily to take large mouthfuls, because you can do that slowly.
Yes, we really are stupid enough that we accept them calling the smallest size on the menu "medium", in blatant contradiction of all that is sensible and logical in the world
It's not a contradiction in the slightest, if you accept the obvious fact that they are not labelling them relative to each other, but to an external set of sizes.
If I run a restaurant and I buy foam cups that say "medium," "large," and "really damn huge" on their boxes, there is no need for me to relabel them as "small," "medium," and "large."
It's all relativistic. You're limiting the naming parameters internal to the set you have at hand, and they are using parameters from a superset.
In fact, I'd prefer it if the cup makers would standardize on naming their sizes, and everyone called them by those names, instead of renaming them. When I am suicidal enough to go to a fast food restaurant, and they ask me what size drink I want, they don't have the cups there for me to look at. Having the smallest available always be listed as a "small" doesn't do me any good, either. But if they have 12, 20, and 200 ounce drinks, then I'd have a much better idea.
I was drinking a couple of glasses worth a day, but looking at the nutritional value of apple and grape juices from concentrate, really, they're not much better.
That doesn't mean I can't have my Jamba Juice instead of dinner, of course, but no more juice for snacking, etc.
Besides which, the porno spammers could get sued for lots of money by the parents of minors...
I'm still waiting for an aggressive district attorney to file criminal charges against porno spammers who send mail to minors - there are a number of different charges that could be brought up. I wonder why it's not been done, yet.
It's going to take the threat of criminal charges to stop most spammers, I think.
The problem with calling this "Dennis-Miller"-ish is that Bruce often knows what he's talking about, and certainly more often sounds like he knows what he's talking about, than Dennis Miller, who seems to use 'big words'(for his studio audience) for effect, and not to better explain any concepts he might be trying to put across.
Besides, Dennis Miller is like that annoying guy you knew from college, who dropped out because he couldn't handle "The Man" telling him what to think, and who comes over, drinks your coffee while telling you how evil you are for being a consumer, makes lame (and obvious and/or misguided) cracks about current affairs and celebrities, flirts with your girlfriend (or boyfriend) and then tries to sell you some weed. Bruce Sterling, briefly, is like a friend you like to go visit, because sometimes he'll show you some new toys, and he usually has cool stories to tell.
The two population are of course completely disjoint. I remember CmdrTaco saying sometime around when Slashdot began offering a subscription that the first one accounts for 80% to 90% of the users of the site.
So people who are karma-capped are just the best of the worst? Also... as a practical matter, you only really get to vote after you start commenting. Makes you wonder what the website is really for, doesn't it? =)
Has anyone else noticed that the ads on hindustantimes.com are not only all in English, but also appear to be in US Dollars, and more significantly, from US companies?
It would seem that the Indian Internet is already partially, if indirectly, funded from international sources.
That's not such a bad idea, especially if, rather than postmaster@... you can get the email of the CEO/CIO/CTO etc...;)
Well, if you really want to mess with them, look in the SOA record for their DNS - you can frequently find high ranking real people listed as the email contact, especially if it's a small company. You can also check the domain registration itself. Just make sure you're mailing an address at their company, and not some consultant that they hired for DNS, or their ISP...
Since I have a mail server set up for my vanity domain, I switched for a while to giving out unique mail userbnames to websites, etc.
Over a year ago, I started forwarding webmillion@[mydomain] to postmaster@webmillion.com, because I was getting several spams a day to that account, and it was pretty clearly their fault.
Last month, I was cleaning up my rules, and decided to remove that rule, thinking that the problem had passed. Wrong! Within an hour I had 4 mails. So the forward went back on.
Oddly enough, Webmillion never contacted me about the fact that I was forwarding buckets of spam to them; I guess they are used to it because of the harvesting they apparently do, and just ignore that account.
If everyone on Slashdot started asking sites like these about their harvesting practices, or simply forwarded the crap mail back to them, they would inevitably find the parctice more costly than beneficial to the bottom line.
There are a lot of Chinese, who work for these Chinese companies, who own only a bicycle, two pairs of black pants, and three white shirts. They are not the sort to worry about convenience in a product they will never own. (I've spent time in Taiwan buying computer parts.)
Maybe so, but a cable sprawl like this implies a generosity of real estate, something I doubt many of those hard workers have. More probably, it was just the simplest design to get a single-layer PCB or something.
I can't believe it's for ease of use, because reliance on colored ports to distinguish between mouse and keyboard is no good when you're fumbling in the dark under the desk, and the status LEDs are useless when it's under there, too.
Still, I love its crazy fake space streamlining, and the cables are surprisingly good for being so thin.
Your cable network will NEVER support descrambling of digital channels, and pay channels on your PC:-( But, with the TIVO DirecTV tuner, you can record all channels.
Programs like Snapstream now have software hooks for hardware adapters to remotely switch your current cable/satellite boxen. Sure, you incur an additional expense for an adapter, but that's probably 10% or less than the cost of a dedicated PVR box like DirecTV.
Re:Degradation of the video quality?
on
USB KVMs Compared
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· Score: 2
The IOGear MiniView SE 4-port has a VERY funky way of switching between computers. One way, to press a control key twice, is okay, but only goes to next computer in line. The other is amazingly foolish:
[alt]+[ctr]+[shift]+[1 or 2 or 3 or 4]+[Enter]
Dude... I don't even think about the keys anymore... now you've messed me up =)
Seriously, though, I have a 4 port PS/2 IOGear, and I mastered that keyboard switch in the first hour of use. My only complaint with the box, in fact, is that since it's a funky design, unless I bolt it underneath the table or something, the cables end up all over the place. I sure wish all the ports were on one side, and that it had the lights and the manual switch on a front panel, so I could put it on top of my desk. As it is, it's just floating back there with my hub and router and dsl model, etc. Thank goodness it doesn't need a power brick!
Oh yah: I also noticed that my work laptop, which was a Gateway Solo 9300, would lose connectivity with the mouse sometimes if I switched away. However, that's got to be a hardware issue on the Gateway side, because all the other machines I've hooked up have been fine. Just a word of warning to anyone with that particular system...
I was just thinking about that book, while reading this...
The basic gyst is that people stage fights with each other, film them, and then sell the films.
Actually, that was just a minor point of the overall story. But it was stilla cool idea. Also, the cameras hovered, so you can't really think of them as planes.
If you want to see another story where floating cameras get a lot of treatment, try Farewell Horizontal, by K.W. Jeter. It's out of print, though, so you'll have to hit a used bookstore.
The problem comes when you notice that the story line of the movie being promoted is so thin, that you got the entire story in the 150 seconds. I can think of many movies who's trailer started off convincing me to see the movie, but by the end have told me that I got the whole deal for free, while waiting for the feature.
They don't call those trailers. They call those public service announcements =)
Seriously - I want to know up front if a movie is so lame that they can't even fill a whole trailer full of interesting things (like Men In Black II).
make a damn fine silver screen adaptation with plenty of subtle homoeroticism? (LotR)
There's some subtle homoeroticism in HP, also. In fact, when J.K. Rowling kills off the "major character" late in the series (as she said she was going to, in some interview a while back), my first guess is that it's going to be Ron Weasley. This would metaphorically mark the end of Harry's adolescence (albeit in a dreadful way - I like Ron more than Harry, actually; it's one thing to have your destiny handed to you, and just have to fulfill it, and it's quite another to be the youngest in a large family, with no clear expectations on you or obvious interests to pursue), as it shows he can no longer go back and fuck around (so to speak) with his schoolboy friends, but must accept his lot as an adult. My next guess would be Hagrid, because Hagrid acted as a replacement dad (or big brother, at least), and it's time for Harry to stand on his own. If she was talking about Dumbledore, well, I will be disappointed, because, sorry, I don't consider him to be a major character (I haven't read book 4 yet, though, so maybe I am wrong), and besides, he's an old geezer, and we all kind of expect him to go anyway.
I have the VHS "movie" version that was distributed here in the US. I haven't watched it, yet, but apparently it's a hacked-up version of the UK TV series, though IMDB says it's Australian.
I loved John Christopher books as a kid; the Tripod series was also serialised in the Boy Scout magazine "Boy's Life," and I'd frequently turn to that page first (even though I'd already read the stories), then the jokes, then ignore most of the rest of the magazine =)
Too bad that John Romero probably doesn't want to leave Texas.
Yah, when I lived there, I said that about a certain State Governor. See what happened? =)
Re:Apple controls the conversation
on
Switch Different
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· Score: 2
apple does not use the monicker TiBook. They call it the PowerBook G4. it is the users that call it the TiBook.
If the users call it "TiBook" or "Ti Book" or "Ti Powerbook," that's all fine by me. "Ti" is the proper abbreviation for titanium. However, when they say "TI Powerbook," they make it look like it's a TI product, and that's wrong. That's all I was really trying to say. =)
Re:Apple controls the conversation
on
Switch Different
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· Score: 2
I wonder how many are willing to admit that they drool at night at the thought of owning a TI Powerbook
I probably would have gotten one years ago if TI really was the manufacturer (they used to make some of the best laptops on the market, and have experience in making things rugged from their decades as a defense contractor).
As it is, I still want to get a Mac after I get another job, but I'm unsure whether to get a desktop or laptop right now. I could use a new laptop, but, I'm sorry, naming a laptop after the material it's made from is pretty funny, and smacks of conspicuous consumption. It's almost like an SUV with Greenpeace stickers, or a vegan leather dyke. Besides, if you stick to that convention, wouldn't you have a "recycled plastic emac" line, too? =)
Slashdot Mirror
When I moved here, I wanted to get a Safeway store card. No problem, they said - here's the card, return this form after you fill it out, here's your groceries, have a nice day.
I took the form home, and it got lost. No, not deliberately, though I have no incentive to look for it now. I have found the form a few times, and have thought about returning it so I can start to get air miles, but they aren't for the 3 airline programs I am already in, so there's not much point. Even though my receipts all say "new customer" on them, I still get the discounts, and the system still racks up special discounts for me when I buy over a certain amount in a month.
They can still use my purchasing data in aggregate form, you see - they know that somewhere there's a person, probably a single white geeky male, who buys low fat and health foods, but then also binges on chips and dingdongs every other month. They can offer me coupons based upon the brands they know I buy, without having to verify my demographics. It's all pretty cool. I don't mind being "targeted" in this fashion, either; if I already use the stuff, why not?
And yes, I always pay cash.
The problem with 7-Eleven is that the "Gulp" really should be called the "Small Gulp".
What's a small gulp? Isn't that like a sip?
I've always been confused by the fact that they used a measurement of speed instead of size, anyway. Gulping your drink down means to drink it fast, not necessarily to take large mouthfuls, because you can do that slowly.
Yes, we really are stupid enough that we accept them calling the smallest size on the menu "medium", in blatant contradiction of all that is sensible and logical in the world
It's not a contradiction in the slightest, if you accept the obvious fact that they are not labelling them relative to each other, but to an external set of sizes.
If I run a restaurant and I buy foam cups that say "medium," "large," and "really damn huge" on their boxes, there is no need for me to relabel them as "small," "medium," and "large."
It's all relativistic. You're limiting the naming parameters internal to the set you have at hand, and they are using parameters from a superset.
In fact, I'd prefer it if the cup makers would standardize on naming their sizes, and everyone called them by those names, instead of renaming them. When I am suicidal enough to go to a fast food restaurant, and they ask me what size drink I want, they don't have the cups there for me to look at. Having the smallest available always be listed as a "small" doesn't do me any good, either. But if they have 12, 20, and 200 ounce drinks, then I'd have a much better idea.
My doctor said to get off the juice, too.
I was drinking a couple of glasses worth a day, but looking at the nutritional value of apple and grape juices from concentrate, really, they're not much better.
That doesn't mean I can't have my Jamba Juice instead of dinner, of course, but no more juice for snacking, etc.
Besides which, the porno spammers could get sued for lots of money by the parents of minors...
I'm still waiting for an aggressive district attorney to file criminal charges against porno spammers who send mail to minors - there are a number of different charges that could be brought up. I wonder why it's not been done, yet.
It's going to take the threat of criminal charges to stop most spammers, I think.
The problem with calling this "Dennis-Miller"-ish is that Bruce often knows what he's talking about, and certainly more often sounds like he knows what he's talking about, than Dennis Miller, who seems to use 'big words'(for his studio audience) for effect, and not to better explain any concepts he might be trying to put across.
Besides, Dennis Miller is like that annoying guy you knew from college, who dropped out because he couldn't handle "The Man" telling him what to think, and who comes over, drinks your coffee while telling you how evil you are for being a consumer, makes lame (and obvious and/or misguided) cracks about current affairs and celebrities, flirts with your girlfriend (or boyfriend) and then tries to sell you some weed. Bruce Sterling, briefly, is like a friend you like to go visit, because sometimes he'll show you some new toys, and he usually has cool stories to tell.
...maybe the example people were Enron managers in California?
The two population are of course completely disjoint. I remember CmdrTaco saying sometime around when Slashdot began offering a subscription that the first one accounts for 80% to 90% of the users of the site.
So people who are karma-capped are just the best of the worst? Also... as a practical matter, you only really get to vote after you start commenting. Makes you wonder what the website is really for, doesn't it? =)
Ads are served based on your IP.
Still the ads wouldn't be there without US companies paying for them, which brings me back to my point: they're already getting money from us.
Has anyone else noticed that the ads on hindustantimes.com are not only all in English, but also appear to be in US Dollars, and more significantly, from US companies?
It would seem that the Indian Internet is already partially, if indirectly, funded from international sources.
That's not such a bad idea, especially if, rather than postmaster@... you can get the email of the CEO/CIO/CTO etc... ;)
Well, if you really want to mess with them, look in the SOA record for their DNS - you can frequently find high ranking real people listed as the email contact, especially if it's a small company. You can also check the domain registration itself. Just make sure you're mailing an address at their company, and not some consultant that they hired for DNS, or their ISP...
It gives legal legroom for full admin rights since vague words like "upgrades or fixes" are a lawyer's wet dream.
If I'm reading the EULA right, it lets them auto-download, but not auto-install. That's not full admin rights.
Since I have a mail server set up for my vanity domain, I switched for a while to giving out unique mail userbnames to websites, etc.
Over a year ago, I started forwarding webmillion@[mydomain] to postmaster@webmillion.com, because I was getting several spams a day to that account, and it was pretty clearly their fault.
Last month, I was cleaning up my rules, and decided to remove that rule, thinking that the problem had passed. Wrong! Within an hour I had 4 mails. So the forward went back on.
Oddly enough, Webmillion never contacted me about the fact that I was forwarding buckets of spam to them; I guess they are used to it because of the harvesting they apparently do, and just ignore that account.
If everyone on Slashdot started asking sites like these about their harvesting practices, or simply forwarded the crap mail back to them, they would inevitably find the parctice more costly than beneficial to the bottom line.
There are a lot of Chinese, who work for these Chinese companies, who own only a bicycle, two pairs of black pants, and three white shirts. They are not the sort to worry about convenience in a product they will never own. (I've spent time in Taiwan buying computer parts.)
Maybe so, but a cable sprawl like this implies a generosity of real estate, something I doubt many of those hard workers have. More probably, it was just the simplest design to get a single-layer PCB or something.
I can't believe it's for ease of use, because reliance on colored ports to distinguish between mouse and keyboard is no good when you're fumbling in the dark under the desk, and the status LEDs are useless when it's under there, too.
Still, I love its crazy fake space streamlining, and the cables are surprisingly good for being so thin.
Your cable network will NEVER support descrambling of digital channels, and pay channels on your PC :-( But, with the TIVO DirecTV tuner, you can record all channels.
Programs like Snapstream now have software hooks for hardware adapters to remotely switch your current cable/satellite boxen. Sure, you incur an additional expense for an adapter, but that's probably 10% or less than the cost of a dedicated PVR box like DirecTV.
The IOGear MiniView SE 4-port has a VERY funky way of switching between computers. One way, to press a control key twice, is okay, but only goes to next computer in line. The other is amazingly foolish:
[alt]+[ctr]+[shift]+[1 or 2 or 3 or 4]+[Enter]
Dude... I don't even think about the keys anymore... now you've messed me up =)
Seriously, though, I have a 4 port PS/2 IOGear, and I mastered that keyboard switch in the first hour of use. My only complaint with the box, in fact, is that since it's a funky design, unless I bolt it underneath the table or something, the cables end up all over the place. I sure wish all the ports were on one side, and that it had the lights and the manual switch on a front panel, so I could put it on top of my desk. As it is, it's just floating back there with my hub and router and dsl model, etc. Thank goodness it doesn't need a power brick!
Oh yah: I also noticed that my work laptop, which was a Gateway Solo 9300, would lose connectivity with the mouse sometimes if I switched away. However, that's got to be a hardware issue on the Gateway side, because all the other machines I've hooked up have been fine. Just a word of warning to anyone with that particular system...
I was just thinking about that book, while reading this...
The basic gyst is that people stage fights with each other, film them, and then sell the films.
Actually, that was just a minor point of the overall story. But it was stilla cool idea. Also, the cameras hovered, so you can't really think of them as planes.
If you want to see another story where floating cameras get a lot of treatment, try Farewell Horizontal, by K.W. Jeter.
It's out of print, though, so you'll have to hit a used bookstore.
Oh Tom, why did ye have to regenerate. Dr. Who was never the same without you.
I actually liked Peter; it was when Colin and later Sylvester came that I stopped watching entirely.
The problem comes when you notice that the story line of the movie being promoted is so thin, that you got the entire story in the 150 seconds. I can think of many movies who's trailer started off convincing me to see the movie, but by the end have told me that I got the whole deal for free, while waiting for the feature.
They don't call those trailers. They call those public service announcements =)
Seriously - I want to know up front if a movie is so lame that they can't even fill a whole trailer full of interesting things (like Men In Black II).
make a damn fine silver screen adaptation with plenty of subtle homoeroticism? (LotR)
There's some subtle homoeroticism in HP, also. In fact, when J.K. Rowling kills off the "major character" late in the series (as she said she was going to, in some interview a while back), my first guess is that it's going to be Ron Weasley. This would metaphorically mark the end of Harry's adolescence (albeit in a dreadful way - I like Ron more than Harry, actually; it's one thing to have your destiny handed to you, and just have to fulfill it, and it's quite another to be the youngest in a large family, with no clear expectations on you or obvious interests to pursue), as it shows he can no longer go back and fuck around (so to speak) with his schoolboy friends, but must accept his lot as an adult. My next guess would be Hagrid, because Hagrid acted as a replacement dad (or big brother, at least), and it's time for Harry to stand on his own. If she was talking about Dumbledore, well, I will be disappointed, because, sorry, I don't consider him to be a major character (I haven't read book 4 yet, though, so maybe I am wrong), and besides, he's an old geezer, and we all kind of expect him to go anyway.
There's an English TV series of The Tripods
I have the VHS "movie" version that was distributed here in the US. I haven't watched it, yet, but apparently it's a hacked-up version of the UK TV series, though IMDB says it's Australian.
I loved John Christopher books as a kid; the Tripod series was also serialised in the Boy Scout magazine "Boy's Life," and I'd frequently turn to that page first (even though I'd already read the stories), then the jokes, then ignore most of the rest of the magazine =)
Too bad that John Romero probably doesn't want to leave Texas.
Yah, when I lived there, I said that about a certain State Governor. See what happened? =)
apple does not use the monicker TiBook. They call it the PowerBook G4. it is the users that call it the TiBook.
If the users call it "TiBook" or "Ti Book" or "Ti Powerbook," that's all fine by me. "Ti" is the proper abbreviation for titanium. However, when they say "TI Powerbook," they make it look like it's a TI product, and that's wrong. That's all I was really trying to say. =)
I wonder how many are willing to admit that they drool at night at the thought of owning a TI Powerbook
I probably would have gotten one years ago if TI really was the manufacturer (they used to make some of the best laptops on the market, and have experience in making things rugged from their decades as a defense contractor).
As it is, I still want to get a Mac after I get another job, but I'm unsure whether to get a desktop or laptop right now. I could use a new laptop, but, I'm sorry, naming a laptop after the material it's made from is pretty funny, and smacks of conspicuous consumption. It's almost like an SUV with Greenpeace stickers, or a vegan leather dyke. Besides, if you stick to that convention, wouldn't you have a "recycled plastic emac" line, too? =)
Yeah I'm sure it was good paper...
Hey, you expect too much from junior high girls =)
Plus, she never said "I was good student..."