I could see your being upset if your last name was spammer, with a small s and a second m, but it isn't. Even Hormel doesn't mind the term spam as long as one doesn't use pictures of their product, and uses a lower case s. And I've always considered them to be too uptight about it. You've certainly put them in their proper place in my book now.
I don't believe that computing cycles are the contention point here. The difference is in who is paying for the bandwidth. Consider these two hypothetical cases:
A. Not worrying about razor
The spammer loads up their spam program and gives it a dump file of five hundred thousand email addresses. It takes these, and using its knowledge of spam friendly networks, sends one copy of the spam to 500 different relay servers. Each server receives an identical e-mail with 1000 different bccs. The e-mail body is only 20k, adding the 1000 addresses gives you another 20k or so, so the spammer spends 20 megs in bandwith (20k+20k * 500 mails sent)
B. Worrying about razor
The spammer loads up their spam program and gives it a dump file of five hundred thousand email addresses. It takes these, and the message to be spammed, and sends a slightly modified message to each group of we'll say 10 addresses. This way, if one of the messages gets razor'ed, they only lose 9 possible reads. The spamware sends out 100 emails to each of the 500 spam friendly servers. The e-mail body is only 20k, and the 10 addresses only add 1k or less, so the total message is only 21k now, but it is sent out 100*500 times. The spammer has spent over 1 gig in bandwith now.
I bought an Alpine headend with the intent to use XM because they were going live first. I also own a 60 gig Dension DMP3 player that is hooked up to my trucks sound system. When I got the XM installed, I totally stopped listening to regular FM. Now-a-days, I mostly listen to my MP3 player for music, but I frequently listen to the comedy channels, C-NET radio, and BBC on XM. I am usually in my truck from 2.5 to 4 hours per day, so I get a lot of listening in.:)
As far as XM signal quality, it does cut out for not more than one second several times on my trip (Rt. 3, 495, 95 from NH to Boston), most of these cutouts are under bridges. They are mildly irritating, but not enough to discourage my listening.
They appear to be listening to their customer base too. When I started out, they had a lot of dead advertising slots that they were filling up with ads for other XM channels. Some of these ads were enough to make me scream and throw the radio out the window.:) I complained to their feedback address, and received a prompt reply stating that they were aware of the problem and were in the process of reworking these bits to be much better. Now, the unused ad spots have info spots like "Today in Music History" and other similar things. Channel style spots will take the form of telling you interesting information and then a quick one-liner for the channel number. I was very pleased with the change.:)
10 gigs? Try 137.:)
I own both XM and a Dension DMP3 player. See my XM comments elsewhere in this article.
Re:Using decent security precautions to prevent th
on
Spyware Fights Back
·
· Score: 1
I'll also mention, just in case someone says, "This is stupid, then Ad-Aware couldn't function properly because it needs to do X":
You can set up a special link to the Ad-Aware executable with Run-As configured to run it under the user that has the appropriate permissions.
Using decent security precautions to prevent this
on
Spyware Fights Back
·
· Score: 1
I didn't download and monitor the spyware laden junk, so I don't know how they detect and remove ad-aware, but for Windows 2000 and XP users, it wouldn't be hard for them to prevent this.
All that has to be done is to remove the appropriate registry key and folder permissions for all things ad-aware related. You can do something like remove read permissions from the registry keys and remove change permission from the file folders, and give the permissions only to a user you don't normally log in with (e.g. administrator). Then, even if the program could find ad-aware, it couldn't do anything about it other than not install, which is the only solution they should have considered at all.
I've done something similar with my HKLM and HKCU Run keys to prevent programs from adding anything to them. If I decide it is something I want to be there, I put it in my startup folder manually.
I am probably in the same boat as some of the others, I don't care about the adds *that* much because at most, I've only seen two on a page. I still intend to subscribe to help support Slashdot.
Here is my suggestion, when the user is actively contributing to the site, (e.g. just submitted a moderation, meta-moderation, or comment) have that one single page load not count against their ad blocking tally. If they sit there and hit F5 or change their threshold, I am fine with that counting. I think that this would be an easy way to alleviate the distress of your active posters (some of whom won't ever see this comment due to the blackout.:) while not taking away too much of your ad revenue.
It is a subtle twisting of the truth. The law says that you should not violate the license agreement of the OS you are using. There are two ways the license agreement could easily be violated in the case of a donated PC. 1. The person who donated the PC kept the OS that was originally installed on it, and is still using that OS on a different machine.
This is a violation because OEM licenses specifically state that the OS is only licensed for the original computer it was installed on. 2. The person upgraded the OS on the donated PC, but did not give you all of the appropriate materials required to legally transfer the license of the new OS.
An example of this is: Person A buys a computer with Microsoft Windows® CEMeNT on it and later upgrades the computer to have Microsoft Windows® eXPlode. They then donate the computer to a school, but fail to include any of the documentation, CDs or licenses for either OS. At this point, the school is not legally allowed to use eXPlode, and Person A is not allowed to use CEMeNT and violated their eXPlode license agreement by distributing the OS to someone else.
Rather than giving you the blunt facts and letting you interpret the fact that as long as you have a legal license for whatever OS you decide to use on the PC (such as the GPL license of a Linux distro), Microsoft decided to twist the truth to make schools spend more money either buying new PCs (with Windows® installed) or buying new Windows® licenses for the donated PC.
What you describe here is already being done to some extent by the P3P Project. It is designed to give consumers a quick concise view of how a website's privacy policy matches up to their preferences. You fill out a survey stating what you look for in a website, both the good and the bad, then when you visit a website, you can view the differences with P3P. Check it out.
HELMET: So the combination is one, two, three, four, five.::lifting mask:: That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life. That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage.
You're telling me that if I left a tea kettle full of tap water in my car on a 90 degree day, it would boil over?
Where are these numbers?
Obvious case of bombing I ran into
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A few months back, I did a Google search for "javascript string manipulation", and was rewarded with a dozen hits all along the lines of: "Hot Teen Javascript String Manipulation" "Live XXX Javascript String Manipulation" "Upskirt Javascript String Manipulation" "Sizzling Javascript String Manipulation" etc. They were all using some sort of cgi to generate the links. It took Google a month or so to remove them.
Thought it might be a prelude to something like this.
Personally, I care very little about the bloggers bombing certain keywords. They likely have something to say on the topic. The thing I fear is the stupid sex sites, online casinos, and mlm scams diluting my search results.
The good and bad of current voice recognition
on
TuVox Voice Interface
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've used TellMe's service quite a lot in the past. Driving directions, Movie listings, and just generally wasting time on the phone. It is a great service. I even played around with VXML, where I came up against the greatest current limitation with non-speach-to-text voice recognition systems:
They seem to be pretty much exclusively based on grammar files. Basically, you write out a grammar that lists all the possible things you think the person speaking would utter and then match them up to different branches in your system. Unfortunately, you can't easily take free form speach and store it as anything other than a sound file. This makes it difficult to do something such as allow the user to speak a message to send as an e-mail. The VXML engines have a great deal of heuristics to handle differences in speach style and tone, but without the grammar, you pretty much need to go through voice profile training to get decent results.
If anyone knows of kewl advances in this particular area, I'd love to hear them!
I agree. In hindsight, it was folly. There were two easy assumptions that led me into this course though:
a) No overtime Super Bowls as yet. Unfortunately, it ran over the allotted time even without overtime.
b) I already have most of the other shows on Fox set to pad thirty minutes to the end due to their propensity to ignore the schedule in favor of sports events. This turns my thirty hour Tivo that I only get 15 hours on anyway into a 10 hour recorder, and the HD space is at a premium now.
And did you notice the people who recorded the Super Bowl, but not Malcom, and had the recording end with forty seconds left on the clock? I'm surprised they collected so much data on the field goal since we sure didn't get to see it.:(
This sounds like a very good idea to me. I wonder why it hasn't been brought up (to my knowledge) yet in legal circles... If it has, I wonder why it was shot down. There are a few companies out there that already offer their products for free to individuals, and sell licenses to companies. www.ssh.com is one of them.
Just FYI, you should always ask to be added to a telemarketer's "do not call list" rather than asking to be "taken off their list". The latter can be legally interpreted by some companies to be "the list we are calling off of today". But the "do not call list" is required to be kept for something like seven to ten years or somesuch.
According to this document, several institutions are allowed to require or request your SSN.
Furthermore, the SSA states,
"If a business or other enterprise asks you for your SSN, you can refuse to give it. However, that may mean doing without the purchase or service for which your number was requested."
I have to disagree with this. In most of these large chains now-a-days, the managers you are likely speak with don't care any more about you than the cashier does. I believe they will stick to their old rule and tell you you are just out of luck.
I dislike sounding this down-trodden, but I do not think things are going to get better on this front. They will keep putting more unreasonable copy protection schemes on these cds, and unless they really goof and make them where they won't play on the millions of cd-players of the millions of teenie-boppers that they actually care about, our ten to twenty thousand complaints won't even make it on the bottom of one of the record producer's action item lists.
IANAP*, IANAFI**, IANAFAAO***, et al.
Isn't there some sort of requirement for a minimum amount of "solo hours" before you can get your pilot's license?
If so, it would still be a considerable interuption in many lives.
* Pilot
** Flight Instructor
*** FAA**** Official
**** Federal Aviation Administration
This is not supposed to happen, and in most cases it won't. LaBrea will attempt to release any hold it has on an ip address if a legitimate machine comes onto the LAN with that IP. It is in the docs, take a look.
Slashdot Mirror
I could see your being upset if your last name was spammer, with a small s and a second m, but it isn't. Even Hormel doesn't mind the term spam as long as one doesn't use pictures of their product, and uses a lower case s. And I've always considered them to be too uptight about it. You've certainly put them in their proper place in my book now.
::Shrug::
I don't believe that computing cycles are the contention point here. The difference is in who is paying for the bandwidth. Consider these two hypothetical cases:
A. Not worrying about razor
The spammer loads up their spam program and gives it a dump file of five hundred thousand email addresses. It takes these, and using its knowledge of spam friendly networks, sends one copy of the spam to 500 different relay servers. Each server receives an identical e-mail with 1000 different bccs. The e-mail body is only 20k, adding the 1000 addresses gives you another 20k or so, so the spammer spends 20 megs in bandwith (20k+20k * 500 mails sent)
B. Worrying about razor
The spammer loads up their spam program and gives it a dump file of five hundred thousand email addresses. It takes these, and the message to be spammed, and sends a slightly modified message to each group of we'll say 10 addresses. This way, if one of the messages gets razor'ed, they only lose 9 possible reads. The spamware sends out 100 emails to each of the 500 spam friendly servers. The e-mail body is only 20k, and the 10 addresses only add 1k or less, so the total message is only 21k now, but it is sent out 100*500 times. The spammer has spent over 1 gig in bandwith now.
That doesn't come cheap.
While skimming through, I noticed quite a few people have mentioned that they have taken more than one counter-offer and been satisfied with it.
The question I have is this:
Was the counter-offer really worth it if it turns out that you did in fact leave the company shortly there-after?
I personally did not consider the only counter-offer I ever received. I did this because I was looking forward to the new job.
I bought an Alpine headend with the intent to use XM because they were going live first. I also own a 60 gig Dension DMP3 player that is hooked up to my trucks sound system. When I got the XM installed, I totally stopped listening to regular FM. Now-a-days, I mostly listen to my MP3 player for music, but I frequently listen to the comedy channels, C-NET radio, and BBC on XM. I am usually in my truck from 2.5 to 4 hours per day, so I get a lot of listening in. :)
:) I complained to their feedback address, and received a prompt reply stating that they were aware of the problem and were in the process of reworking these bits to be much better. Now, the unused ad spots have info spots like "Today in Music History" and other similar things. Channel style spots will take the form of telling you interesting information and then a quick one-liner for the channel number. I was very pleased with the change. :)
As far as XM signal quality, it does cut out for not more than one second several times on my trip (Rt. 3, 495, 95 from NH to Boston), most of these cutouts are under bridges. They are mildly irritating, but not enough to discourage my listening.
They appear to be listening to their customer base too. When I started out, they had a lot of dead advertising slots that they were filling up with ads for other XM channels. Some of these ads were enough to make me scream and throw the radio out the window.
10 gigs? Try 137. :)
I own both XM and a Dension DMP3 player. See my XM comments elsewhere in this article.
I'll also mention, just in case someone says, "This is stupid, then Ad-Aware couldn't function properly because it needs to do X":
You can set up a special link to the Ad-Aware executable with Run-As configured to run it under the user that has the appropriate permissions.
I didn't download and monitor the spyware laden junk, so I don't know how they detect and remove ad-aware, but for Windows 2000 and XP users, it wouldn't be hard for them to prevent this.
All that has to be done is to remove the appropriate registry key and folder permissions for all things ad-aware related. You can do something like remove read permissions from the registry keys and remove change permission from the file folders, and give the permissions only to a user you don't normally log in with (e.g. administrator). Then, even if the program could find ad-aware, it couldn't do anything about it other than not install, which is the only solution they should have considered at all.
I've done something similar with my HKLM and HKCU Run keys to prevent programs from adding anything to them. If I decide it is something I want to be there, I put it in my startup folder manually.
I am probably in the same boat as some of the others, I don't care about the adds *that* much because at most, I've only seen two on a page.
:) while not taking away too much of your ad revenue.
I still intend to subscribe to help support Slashdot.
Here is my suggestion, when the user is actively contributing to the site, (e.g. just submitted a moderation, meta-moderation, or comment) have that one single page load not count against their ad blocking tally. If they sit there and hit F5 or change their threshold, I am fine with that counting. I think that this would be an easy way to alleviate the distress of your active posters (some of whom won't ever see this comment due to the blackout.
It is a subtle twisting of the truth. The law says that you should not violate the license agreement of the OS you are using. There are two ways the license agreement could easily be violated in the case of a donated PC.
1. The person who donated the PC kept the OS that was originally installed on it, and is still using that OS on a different machine.
This is a violation because OEM licenses specifically state that the OS is only licensed for the original computer it was installed on.
2. The person upgraded the OS on the donated PC, but did not give you all of the appropriate materials required to legally transfer the license of the new OS.
An example of this is: Person A buys a computer with Microsoft Windows® CEMeNT on it and later upgrades the computer to have Microsoft Windows® eXPlode. They then donate the computer to a school, but fail to include any of the documentation, CDs or licenses for either OS. At this point, the school is not legally allowed to use eXPlode, and Person A is not allowed to use CEMeNT and violated their eXPlode license agreement by distributing the OS to someone else.
Rather than giving you the blunt facts and letting you interpret the fact that as long as you have a legal license for whatever OS you decide to use on the PC (such as the GPL license of a Linux distro), Microsoft decided to twist the truth to make schools spend more money either buying new PCs (with Windows® installed) or buying new Windows® licenses for the donated PC.
What you describe here is already being done to some extent by the P3P Project. It is designed to give consumers a quick concise view of how a website's privacy policy matches up to their preferences. You fill out a survey stating what you look for in a website, both the good and the bad, then when you visit a website, you can view the differences with P3P. Check it out.
I'm personally hoping that it takes off.
You forgot one of the funniest parts to that:
::lifting mask:: That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard
HELMET: So the combination is one, two, three,
four, five.
in my life. That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage.
I really like this post.
Very insightful.
You're telling me that if I left a tea kettle full of tap water in my car on a 90 degree day, it would boil over?
Where are these numbers?
A few months back, I did a Google search for "javascript string manipulation", and was rewarded with a dozen hits all along the lines of:
"Hot Teen Javascript String Manipulation"
"Live XXX Javascript String Manipulation"
"Upskirt Javascript String Manipulation"
"Sizzling Javascript String Manipulation"
etc. They were all using some sort of cgi to generate the links. It took Google a month or so to remove them.
Thought it might be a prelude to something like this.
Personally, I care very little about the bloggers bombing certain keywords. They likely have something to say on the topic. The thing I fear is the stupid sex sites, online casinos, and mlm scams diluting my search results.
I've used TellMe's service quite a lot in the past. Driving directions, Movie listings, and just generally wasting time on the phone. It is a great service. I even played around with VXML, where I came up against the greatest current limitation with non-speach-to-text voice recognition systems:
They seem to be pretty much exclusively based on grammar files. Basically, you write out a grammar that lists all the possible things you think the person speaking would utter and then match them up to different branches in your system. Unfortunately, you can't easily take free form speach and store it as anything other than a sound file. This makes it difficult to do something such as allow the user to speak a message to send as an e-mail. The VXML engines have a great deal of heuristics to handle differences in speach style and tone, but without the grammar, you pretty much need to go through voice profile training to get decent results.
If anyone knows of kewl advances in this particular area, I'd love to hear them!
I agree. In hindsight, it was folly. There were two easy assumptions that led me into this course though:
a) No overtime Super Bowls as yet. Unfortunately, it ran over the allotted time even without overtime.
b) I already have most of the other shows on Fox set to pad thirty minutes to the end due to their propensity to ignore the schedule in favor of sports events. This turns my thirty hour Tivo that I only get 15 hours on anyway into a 10 hour recorder, and the HD space is at a premium now.
And did you notice the people who recorded the Super Bowl, but not Malcom, and had the recording end with forty seconds left on the clock? I'm surprised they collected so much data on the field goal since we sure didn't get to see it. :(
This sounds like a very good idea to me. I wonder why it hasn't been brought up (to my knowledge) yet in legal circles... If it has, I wonder why it was shot down. There are a few companies out there that already offer their products for free to individuals, and sell licenses to companies. www.ssh.com is one of them.
Just FYI, you should always ask to be added to a telemarketer's "do not call list" rather than asking to be "taken off their list". The latter can be legally interpreted by some companies to be "the list we are calling off of today". But the "do not call list" is required to be kept for something like seven to ten years or somesuch.
I do not believe this is not true.
According to this document, several institutions are allowed to require or request your SSN.
Furthermore, the SSA states,
I have to disagree with this. In most of these large chains now-a-days, the managers you are likely speak with don't care any more about you than the cashier does. I believe they will stick to their old rule and tell you you are just out of luck.
I dislike sounding this down-trodden, but I do not think things are going to get better on this front. They will keep putting more unreasonable copy protection schemes on these cds, and unless they really goof and make them where they won't play on the millions of cd-players of the millions of teenie-boppers that they actually care about, our ten to twenty thousand complaints won't even make it on the bottom of one of the record producer's action item lists.
That seems easier than Vim's set digraphs option.
How would you type a literal "/o" if you needed it with this option set?
Or even:
::GriN:: J/K.
o <BS> /
if you have "set digraph" on.
So tell me emacs die-hards.. would it take more than two hands to hold down all the accelerator keys for this key in emacs?
IANAP*, IANAFI**, IANAFAAO***, et al.
Isn't there some sort of requirement for a minimum amount of "solo hours" before you can get your pilot's license?
If so, it would still be a considerable interuption in many lives.
* Pilot
** Flight Instructor
*** FAA**** Official
**** Federal Aviation Administration
This is not supposed to happen, and in most cases it won't. LaBrea will attempt to release any hold it has on an ip address if a legitimate machine comes onto the LAN with that IP. It is in the docs, take a look.