...but a nice juicy FUCK YOU for buying an ad to place in front of a movie I just paid damn near $20 to see with a woman I will be hopefully having sex with later that evening.
See, thats was the point of the movies back in the day. I wanted to see a story without having to be interrupted at any point of the evening to be told how to releive my inflamed ass or how buying a new car will get me hand jobs from hot women.
I fucking hate going to movie theatres now.
and I was gonna moderate in this thread, too...
shit.
Physical spam is actually more of a nuissance IMO because it is wasteful of real resources and takes up space in my trash bin
Ah, this is the reason you should NOT put your junk mail in the trash...
PLAN 1
What else do we get in the mail that we pretty much only care 1% about? Paper Catalogs, that's what. We get about one of these a week, two if we're really lucky.
Being that most of these things get tossed out, adding to the landfill, we need to figure out a way to get them recycled.
HEY! Lets send them to a company! Companies have better recycling programs than most neighborhoods! To use that, we do this:
Get them freebie business reply envelopes from your many many offers
Take all of the crap that came with it, rip away all marks that identify you
Stuff is all into that envelope.
Take as much of the catalog you just got and cram that into the envelope, too. Be careful not to rip the envelope, and be neat about it. We don't want to make a mess for the post office.
Seal the envelope.
Put the envelope in the proper mailbox.
PLAN 2
You know how you just LOVE getting that magazine you paid for? You chose to get it and all it's juicy content. You read it on the bus, you read it at lunch, you read it in bed, and - if you're like me - you read it on the crapper. The annoyance is these magazines are just FULL of them annoying little cards that fall out all over the bathroom floor while youre trying to balance the thing on your lap, getting everywhere, and goddamnit, i ALREADY SUBSCRIBE to the magazine! Stop giving me chances to subscribe, cause I already have!
I always pull these things out as soon as I can, and you should to, but not to throw away. I also pull out all the pages that have advertisements on both sides. This makes the magazine weigh about a third of what it originally did, and if you atr humping a few of these babies around in your backpack, every ounce counts.
Now we have a big pile of stuff pulled out of magazines just waiting to be added to the landfill. Or Not!
Get that pile of advertisements and subscription cards
Get them freebie business reply envelopes from your many many offers
Take all of the crap that came with it, rip away all marks that identify you
Stuff is all into that envelope.
Cram the cards and advertisements into the envelope. Again, be neat.
Seal the envelope.
Put the envelope in the proper mailbox.
You can also put in a little note to the credit card company about how you look at the ads as you rip them out, so maybe they would want to get print ads in magazines instead of filling our fucking mailboxes with crap.
Another fun side project is filling out ALL of those little cards with jibberish. If I really wanted something from your company, It wouldn't bother me to have to write you a letter and ask for it firsthand. The simple fact that you guys bend over backwards to make it as easy as humanly possible to get your crap tells me how useless it probably is.
Tips:
Add a little note politely asking the company to stop sending this junk to you. Add your name and address to the note if you like so they know who is making the request, not that they'll stop.
Those "Locator Codes" that are sometimes printed on the back of the envelope? Black ballpoint pen can mess the barcode up, or better yet, write above and below it:
"The name and address associated with this code no longer wishes to be contacted by your company ever again, nor are you allowed to sell this name and contact information to any other parties."
Those envelopes with the window to show the delivery address on the application?
Tear the address off the application and tape it in place
I was talking at work with a friend of mine about how this really is not that hard to do. You give them a list of options, they pick one. You give them a way to confirm their choices, they say yes.
There are a number of ways to then store and count this data, with or without a "paper trail". The problem has never been the machines, but the fear of an unscrupulous person goofing with the data to be counted, the same problem we've had exist and seen in action on numerous occations in the past.
Its not the machines, its the people around them.
Anyway, the friend then made the point: "Once these systems are proven to work, and you can count everyone's vote accurately in a matter of a few days and double check it with current technology, the need for an electoral college is now moot. We CAN accurately use the popular vote to decide national issues.
"This changes the total dynamics of the voting process and removes power from people that now have it, and they're not very hip on giving that power up."
Most sports are playable by those interested in them in real life without a whole lot of hastle. Its also much more condusive to going out for beers afterwards.
Conversely...
I don't know of a place in the world where you can join up with your friends, suit up, shoot them in the head with a sniper rifle - taking great joy in watching them flop over dead with a little blood spurt - and then doing it again when they respawn and run into the same area 2 minutes later.
The US spent 40 years building itself into a car based soceity emphasizing on having your own quarter acre of land with a house on it and NOT living in the center of the city. This has been beaten into people's heads as part of "The All American Dream" by pretty much every direction in American soceity. Its to the point where people get tax breaks just because they made the choice to purchase a house. (but thats a whole 'nuther rant) They go from their houses to their cars to wherever they work. I've heard it called "living in the bubble," and thats about the best way I've heard of putting it.
In most places noone goes to downtown if they can help it, and downtowns either never develop or they they've been run down, then all the people in the suburbs - when trying to be coaxed into supporting some event downtown - sy "eew! why would I want to go downtown! Its Icky! Undeseriables live there!" and the cycle continues. Someone that hasnt bought into the whole suburbia thing tries to create some public transport, it gets done half-heartedly (if ever) and then people have a failure to point at as the reason to NOT develop public transit properly.
I've lived in cities that have real downtowns and workable public transportation and people actually live and stay "in the city." These places are about a million times more interesting and vibrant than the rest of this country.
The thought that people should live in urban areas and interact with each other on a daily basis is fairly looked down upon here, thinking that those with the urban view tend to be looked at as "kids" or "hippies" or "communies," when in reality they're just not buying into brand america.
Interesting side note: I was talking with an aquaintance the other night who just moved here from Europe and he was telling me about looking to buy a house. He was totally confused. When I asked him why, he said "All the houses near the heart of the city are so cheap! It makes no sense!" I had to take a second to explain how most cities in the states dont really have much of a heart.
To heep with the thread: When I lived in San Francisco I'd see one or two of these tooling around my neighborhood and I think they're fantastic.
Not everyone commutes 100 miles a day in rough terrain with two kids and a dog, and to be honest, if you don't leave the city that often - why the hell do you need a tank that takes up 24 feet of curbside parking? Are you that important? Unless you're a person that saves peoples lives on a daily basis, the answer is most likely no.
It's newsworthy though because it shows a new vulnerability and one that's far easier to trick your average Windows luser into following
OK, the vulnerability is newsworthy, but yet another example of the behaviors of the drool-and-click crowd is just plain redundant. We KNOW they,re stupid. Hell, THEY know they're stupid - they're just too lazy to care.
Even better, this kind of thing makes some nice coin for people who go out and clean up winbdows machines for $20 an hour.
(Really, after this past year, friends get exactly ONE free checkup, then it costs them. Of course, the frend rate is payable in beers.)
Even with the death penalty in the US we still have far far too many murders/rapes/etc. so it doesn't seem to work as a deterrent.
Maybe thats because we don't actually apply the death penalty in most cases. Telling someone that you're going to punish them will act as a deterrent only if you DO punish them.
I'm just saying.
Re:Installing on Windows....you're kidding, right?
on
SpamAssassin 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think the point you're missing is that these instructions are very complete and fills in every step of the process. Far different from doubleclicking a big fat executable and watching the pretty progress bar.
I for one prefer this kind of install when loading up geeky type things like this. You learn more about your machine and the application, what its doing, and where it is in case you want to modify or otherwise play with it. And really, how can you NOT want to konw this? Your computer is a tool. The more you konw about it the more powerful it becomes.
If you don't want to do all of that, then suffer with what is probably an inferior product. Not all freeware is entirely "free".
On the flip side: when I'm installing games, I'm more than happy to just sit back, drink my beer, and watch the pretty little installation graphics twirl and dance for me. I just wanna get to the killin'.
I have to say I really dig Sunbird, except maybe for the name.
No, the app isnt ready for prime time just yet, but I've played with it and I really dig it for what it is.
Like most of the mozilla family, Sunbird just sits there waiting to be told what to do. It's FAR from robust at this point, but for a single user that has trouble remembering family birthdays, its not a bad little application. It'll come up to speed eventually, and the fact that with a little toying around I managed to store the calendar inside my hosted website and can have the up-to-date calendar on whatever machine I use is fantastic.
For you guys bitching that it wont automatically synch with whatever youre using: for christ's sake, spend 40 minutes learning perl and you can munge that file into just about fomat you need.
I look forward to the day when Sunbird grows up and is no longer just another open source beta.
HijackTHIS - Find out whats in your PC. (semi-advanced) The site for HiJackThis seems to be down for now. THere are a few other little nifty freebie aps in there, too. Heres a mirror download site
Slashdot Mirror
...but then I saw that these guys were using bandwidth to distribute Garfield: The Movie.
For that, I say "Hang the fuckers. Hang 'em high."
Then find the people that actually downloaded it and hang them, too.
Can't AOL subscribers already get their mail from a web based client?
Either way, a free AOL mail account would be really sweet, and by really sweet I mean it will completely suck ass.
I already have a free webmail account that gets flooded with spam every day.
okay okay okay.
I'm the asshiole on this one. You caught me in a feisty and bad mood.
I still think ads at the movies suck ass, though.
...but a nice juicy FUCK YOU for buying an ad to place in front of a movie I just paid damn near $20 to see with a woman I will be hopefully having sex with later that evening.
See, thats was the point of the movies back in the day. I wanted to see a story without having to be interrupted at any point of the evening to be told how to releive my inflamed ass or how buying a new car will get me hand jobs from hot women.
I fucking hate going to movie theatres now.
and I was gonna moderate in this thread, too...
shit.
forgot one:
Destroy the Apostrophe
Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots.
I mean, really.
I had to hang this up on the wall at my workplace, not that it did a lick of good.
and it tarnishes Lycos's good name
Lycos had a good name? When? When they had that fucking dog?
The thing is you don't want to bring their site down, because that doesnt really cost them as much as incredible amounts of bandwidth will.
They're used to getting a trickle of the stupid and the curious, and paying with that from the 1 in 30,000 purchases they get.
By the way, anyone got that URL for the fuckers sending me fifteen offers a day to buy a rolex watch?
They could use a good ass pounding.
More importantly, who the fuck would buy THAT CRAP?! A total moron?
oh, wait, bought something from spam...
Ah, this is the reason you should NOT put your junk mail in the trash...
PLAN 1
What else do we get in the mail that we pretty much only care 1% about? Paper Catalogs, that's what. We get about one of these a week, two if we're really lucky.
Being that most of these things get tossed out, adding to the landfill, we need to figure out a way to get them recycled.
HEY! Lets send them to a company! Companies have better recycling programs than most neighborhoods! To use that, we do this:
PLAN 2
You know how you just LOVE getting that magazine you paid for? You chose to get it and all it's juicy content. You read it on the bus, you read it at lunch, you read it in bed, and - if you're like me - you read it on the crapper. The annoyance is these magazines are just FULL of them annoying little cards that fall out all over the bathroom floor while youre trying to balance the thing on your lap, getting everywhere, and goddamnit, i ALREADY SUBSCRIBE to the magazine! Stop giving me chances to subscribe, cause I already have!
I always pull these things out as soon as I can, and you should to, but not to throw away. I also pull out all the pages that have advertisements on both sides. This makes the magazine weigh about a third of what it originally did, and if you atr humping a few of these babies around in your backpack, every ounce counts.
Now we have a big pile of stuff pulled out of magazines just waiting to be added to the landfill. Or Not!
You can also put in a little note to the credit card company about how you look at the ads as you rip them out, so maybe they would want to get print ads in magazines instead of filling our fucking mailboxes with crap.
Another fun side project is filling out ALL of those little cards with jibberish. If I really wanted something from your company, It wouldn't bother me to have to write you a letter and ask for it firsthand. The simple fact that you guys bend over backwards to make it as easy as humanly possible to get your crap tells me how useless it probably is.
Tips:
"It took my son two months to decide to even be near a cell phone," said his mother, Cris. "But he needs one."
Thirteen years old and he needs a cell phone?
Hey Lady, fuck you.
Teach him to carry an extra couple of quarters in his pocket.
I was talking at work with a friend of mine about how this really is not that hard to do. You give them a list of options, they pick one. You give them a way to confirm their choices, they say yes.
There are a number of ways to then store and count this data, with or without a "paper trail". The problem has never been the machines, but the fear of an unscrupulous person goofing with the data to be counted, the same problem we've had exist and seen in action on numerous occations in the past.
Its not the machines, its the people around them.
Anyway, the friend then made the point: "Once these systems are proven to work, and you can count everyone's vote accurately in a matter of a few days and double check it with current technology, the need for an electoral college is now moot. We CAN accurately use the popular vote to decide national issues.
"This changes the total dynamics of the voting process and removes power from people that now have it, and they're not very hip on giving that power up."
Thats really pretty much it, I think.
Yet another gadget for people to fuck with when they
SHOULD BE PAYING ATTENTION TO THEIR DRIVING.
yay.
...that it looks like the A.P. has poorly educated High School Students writing their articles now?
I mean, this thing looks like its target at about a 4th grade reading level.
Happy B-Day to D&D anyway.
Most sports are playable by those interested in them in real life without a whole lot of hastle. Its also much more condusive to going out for beers afterwards.
Conversely...
I don't know of a place in the world where you can join up with your friends, suit up, shoot them in the head with a sniper rifle - taking great joy in watching them flop over dead with a little blood spurt - and then doing it again when they respawn and run into the same area 2 minutes later.
i'm just sayin.
Yes, actually, yes it does look cool. Functional and cool, as a matter of fact.
A car doesn't have to look like a titanic metal phallus to look cool.
Man, I so need to move the fuck out of the States.
The US spent 40 years building itself into a car based soceity emphasizing on having your own quarter acre of land with a house on it and NOT living in the center of the city. This has been beaten into people's heads as part of "The All American Dream" by pretty much every direction in American soceity. Its to the point where people get tax breaks just because they made the choice to purchase a house. (but thats a whole 'nuther rant) They go from their houses to their cars to wherever they work. I've heard it called "living in the bubble," and thats about the best way I've heard of putting it.
In most places noone goes to downtown if they can help it, and downtowns either never develop or they they've been run down, then all the people in the suburbs - when trying to be coaxed into supporting some event downtown - sy "eew! why would I want to go downtown! Its Icky! Undeseriables live there!" and the cycle continues. Someone that hasnt bought into the whole suburbia thing tries to create some public transport, it gets done half-heartedly (if ever) and then people have a failure to point at as the reason to NOT develop public transit properly.
I've lived in cities that have real downtowns and workable public transportation and people actually live and stay "in the city." These places are about a million times more interesting and vibrant than the rest of this country.
The thought that people should live in urban areas and interact with each other on a daily basis is fairly looked down upon here, thinking that those with the urban view tend to be looked at as "kids" or "hippies" or "communies," when in reality they're just not buying into brand america.
Interesting side note: I was talking with an aquaintance the other night who just moved here from Europe and he was telling me about looking to buy a house. He was totally confused. When I asked him why, he said "All the houses near the heart of the city are so cheap! It makes no sense!" I had to take a second to explain how most cities in the states dont really have much of a heart.
To heep with the thread: When I lived in San Francisco I'd see one or two of these tooling around my neighborhood and I think they're fantastic.
Not everyone commutes 100 miles a day in rough terrain with two kids and a dog, and to be honest, if you don't leave the city that often - why the hell do you need a tank that takes up 24 feet of curbside parking? Are you that important? Unless you're a person that saves peoples lives on a daily basis, the answer is most likely no.
It's newsworthy though because it shows a new vulnerability and one that's far easier to trick your average Windows luser into following
OK, the vulnerability is newsworthy, but yet another example of the behaviors of the drool-and-click crowd is just plain redundant. We KNOW they,re stupid. Hell, THEY know they're stupid - they're just too lazy to care.
Even better, this kind of thing makes some nice coin for people who go out and clean up winbdows machines for $20 an hour.
(Really, after this past year, friends get exactly ONE free checkup, then it costs them. Of course, the frend rate is payable in beers.)
Even with the death penalty in the US we still have far far too many murders/rapes/etc. so it doesn't seem to work as a deterrent.
Maybe thats because we don't actually apply the death penalty in most cases. Telling someone that you're going to punish them will act as a deterrent only if you DO punish them.
I'm just saying.
I think the point you're missing is that these instructions are very complete and fills in every step of the process. Far different from doubleclicking a big fat executable and watching the pretty progress bar.
I for one prefer this kind of install when loading up geeky type things like this. You learn more about your machine and the application, what its doing, and where it is in case you want to modify or otherwise play with it. And really, how can you NOT want to konw this? Your computer is a tool. The more you konw about it the more powerful it becomes.
If you don't want to do all of that, then suffer with what is probably an inferior product. Not all freeware is entirely "free".
On the flip side: when I'm installing games, I'm more than happy to just sit back, drink my beer, and watch the pretty little installation graphics twirl and dance for me. I just wanna get to the killin'.
...but this is pretty good stuff.
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2374
enjoy.
I have to say I really dig Sunbird, except maybe for the name.
No, the app isnt ready for prime time just yet, but I've played with it and I really dig it for what it is.
Like most of the mozilla family, Sunbird just sits there waiting to be told what to do. It's FAR from robust at this point, but for a single user that has trouble remembering family birthdays, its not a bad little application. It'll come up to speed eventually, and the fact that with a little toying around I managed to store the calendar inside my hosted website and can have the up-to-date calendar on whatever machine I use is fantastic.
For you guys bitching that it wont automatically synch with whatever youre using: for christ's sake, spend 40 minutes learning perl and you can munge that file into just about fomat you need.
I look forward to the day when Sunbird grows up and is no longer just another open source beta.
I've found the following helpful for the no-budget set:
Avast Home Edition Virus Scanner
Spybot Search and Destroy
HijackTHIS - Find out whats in your PC. (semi-advanced)
The site for HiJackThis seems to be down for now. THere are a few other little nifty freebie aps in there, too. Heres a mirror download site
AdAware - picks up a lot of crap in your PC
(Anyone wanna offer up a few opinions on this stuff? You know you do.)
Of course, the obligatory comment of "Use Mozilla, keep your shit patched, don't click every OK button you see" still applies.
"DUDE! You''never guess where I'm calling you from!
I'M ON A PLANE!
Yeah....
YEAH...
No... AN AIRPLANE, LIKE IN THE AIR AND FLYING
HOW WAS THAT PARTY? Did you tap that Omicron? YEEAAAAAAHHHH, BRO!!!"
[continue on until you find something security didn't take to kill fellow passenger with]
yet another reason to not fly.
Headline: The RIAA sued people again. Those dicks.
Comment 1: FIRST POST!
Comment 2: Man, the music industry sucks.
Comment 3: Its illegal. period
Comment 3a: STFU, dink.
Comment 4: if albums didn't suck, people would buy them instead of downloading the songs thay like
Comment 4a: can someone send me the new Modest Mouse album?
Comment 5: I hate rich musicians, because they're rich
Comment 6: [ something about gay niggers that ususally gets modded out of existence ]
Comment 7: its all the fault of the government, because theyre clueless
Comment 8: You cannot stop technology. Technology is legion.
- - - -
You can now go read another article.
enough of the lawsuit count, guys.