Lecter Never Chopped Off His Own Hand
on
Hannibal's Return
·
· Score: 1
Am I the only one that noticed Hannibal Lecter never chopped off his own hand? Either Clarice or Hannibal had the key all along. Go see the movie again and see if you see what I saw. Watch carefully after the police arrive.
Why don't the damn government make rebates illegal or something? It's like those pyramid schemes, it's just there to scam people.
But since I can't change the law, I always get back at these stupid companies some other way. For every $1 I get ripped off, I will punish them with $10. BestBuy and CompUSA are the worst rebate frauds.
This is what I do. I'd go buy something, open it, take something I need, and then return the damn MF item. I got burned by Iomega a few years back with their stupid Jazz drive rebate, so I went back a few months later, got myself another Jazz drive, took it home, opened it, and confiscated for myself an extra Jazz disk ($100 at the store if bought separately). Then I returned that damn drive and gave Iomega a middle finger salute!
[dislaimer: the above is nothing but a dream that I would love to carry out one day]
So is it now fair to say that we have lost yet another battle against those evil corporations
Evil? you gotta be kidding me you socialist freak. I keep seeing people bang on big corporations for being evil. How's a mom-n-pop shop not "evil"? Don't we all have greed? Don't we all want money? Evil... You just throw words out there expecting people to just believe you. Sigh...
There's a definite downturn in ad spending. 6 months ago Valueclick was more than happy to pay me month after month, but these days, with inventory still high but demand low, they're getting pickier and pickier. So a 2 months ago Valueclick suddenly terminates my account and doesn't pay me at all for my last 2 months there. Same has happened to adflight, everyone.net, etc...
What in the world does "ethical" and "moral" mean?
It's just a self-serving philosophy that protects and serves the interests of human beings, and only human beings. It's a way for people to get along together in a civilized manner.
Being ethical/moral doesn't mean it's "right". There is no such thing as being "right". We kill animals for food and for fun, is that "ethical"?
So, is cloning un-ethical? Yes, it is not advantageous to current human survival. Why? Because it aims to perfect Homo Sapiens in many fantastic ways... Heath, height, ability, looks, strength, EVERYTHING! It has the potential to evolve us into a new species, which means today's "Homo Sapien" might not exist in 500 years from now.
But, evolution is about the survival of the fittest. All it takes is 1 successful breeding to get the ball rolling. And then... how are we to stop it? Who doesn't want to have better looking, smarter, taller, stronger, faster, healthier children?
The thing is, companies with deep pockets will throw tons of money into tons of ridiculous patents at the USPTO, knowing full well that most of them will get rejected.
However, they also know there's a chance some of them might stick.
So under our current system, it doesn't matter how good the uspto is, some lame patents will always get through.
So how do we fix this? Simple. Have some way to PUNISH corporations/individuals who end up having their patents revoked due to obvious prior art. What better way to bend them over the knees than to hit them in the pockets where it really hurts?
Now why didn't etoy sue etoyS during the Christmas season and get them shut down during the holiday sales season? Sigh... if only it were 2 months ago that this happened.
God Damn government. It again is trying to increase its power by drawing the line further away from our freedom. Now it attempts to control our freedom to think and imagine.
Boy, it won't be long till they tell us we can't eat more than 2 Big Macs a week because it's bad for our health.
Right now it's between aol and microsoft. I don't like monopolies either, but don't you think microsoft has just way too much power? I'd rather aol have the monopoly on im and their isp service. At least that way Microsoft has some real competition.
Can you imagine if the fcc forced aol to open up their IM protocol? If they do it'd be 6 months away from microsofot taking it over. They'll embed it in their os, in all future versions of IE, in all Office suites, etc... You get the idea right? Remember how MS defeated Netscape?
Besides, the damn thing's free to download anyways. Why's MS so damn interested in the protocol? What do you think?
What I used to do was stuff those envelopes with a bunch of confetti, then send it off to thos mf...
And when I get those damn telemarketers calling me at inappropriate times, I just sit there, let them babble, then proceed to ask them really stupid questions, one after another, till they get really frustrated and hang up. Ha ha... Wasted those bastards as much time as possible.
Also, am I the only one or have these damn telemarketers started using machines to do their dialing and check if anyone's home? Lately I keep getting those "hold on for an important message" after I pick up the phone and say "hello". Then 5 seconds later a damn telemarketer picks up and starts preaching their crap.
[Spoiler material. don't read me if you haven't seen the film]
I thought this film was totally ridiculous. It looks as though someone with a great idea for a movie just slapped a whole much of sequences together with cheap glue.
Seriously, if you were a multi-billionaire, would you really resort to murder? Do you know how much you risk? One mistake and you lose everything. And I mean everything! This movie would've been much better if they didn't resort to this low-level, Rambo-style plot. It would've been much more intellegient had NURF used other "non-murdering" ways to get what they wanted.
And those evil henchmen... where'd they come up with these people? You mean to tell me some simple blackmail would get them to all work for you to commit more crimes? And isn't Tim Robin's character afraid that they might come and blackmail him back for the evil things he's doing?
The security manager... oh that's even more ludicrous... Whenever something happens he just takes off out of his monitoring station, leaving everything un-attended? I think in real life he would've dispatched security guards to check things out while he stayed put to watch what's going on.
Just when things couldn't get any better, the writer/director got stuck... What to do when the security manager catches Filipe's character? Well how about this? We just add a one-liner, something like... "wanna know what really goes on in this place?"... and magically, Mr. Security joins up with the "good" guys. Sigh...
Those password screens... A few keystrokes and magical events take place. Just to break into an NT machine with a user password would take you hours our days, if you had some password cracker. No... all he needs is his 10 fingers and 50 keystrokes.
Let me ramble on...
After Filipe finds out about what might really be going on, who does he go to? Some co-worker (that black-haired girl) who works for Mr. Evil? Isn't that the stupidest thing to do? You trust no one, yet you spill your guts out to someone who works on the inside?
Last but not least, in the beginning of the movie when they talked of open source, I just had to laugh... Yeah, we'll give the source out to the world for free, and get paid for "support"! After all why do we have capitalism instead of communism? Seems like in the movie, greed is evil (capitalism), and giving everything away for free is good (communism). Wake up already!
I come from a webmaster's perspective. Hear me out:
I have a site. My site generates more than 15gb of traffic per day. To accommodate for this traffic I have set up a colocation account with a local ISP. Here's a breakdown of my costs:
- I pay $1800 a month on my bandwidth and cabinet space.
- I spend 5 hours a day on my site. This amounts to 150 hours a month.
- I have 5 servers, which I paid out of my own pocket. Including the load-balancing software and other 3rd party software, I've spent over $20,000 on hardware/software.
- When my site goes down at 3 in the morning, I am paged on my cell phone. I have to drag my ass out of bed, drive down to the colo facility with my tools hoping it's just something minor. If it's major, I have to stay there until it's fixed! Whether it's 1 hour, 10 hours, or 20 hours, I gotta make it work. This alone is worth tons of money, really. I mean, what would you expect for a salary if your employer said "you're on call 24/7. If things ever break, you don't go home till it's working again".
Not so cheap heh? On top of all this, I have to also deal with ad brokers till I'm sick in the stomach. I've had over 10 ad brokers cancel/reject my site because of my content. It's mostly forum content and that's considered "undesirable" to them (since it's user-posted content, and thus "low quality"). In fact, at this moment I don't have any advertisers. I'm paying everything out of my own pocket.
Things didn't use to be this way. 6 months ago my traffic yielded me $8000 a month. Subtract out my costs and it was still profitable. Today? $0 income and all those costs? I don't even know why I'm still operating. Maybe it's because I'm hoping for a brighter day... Maybe it's because I don't want to disappoint my 60,000 website members.
So to all you folks who only care about blocking out ads, leeching the net for free, thinking only of yourselves... Please... take a moment and imagine yourself in my shoes. How would you feel then?
This is all coming from me, a guy who, before his website business days, used to hate all ad banners, who blocked all cookie access, who, if interested in an ad (if ever), would copy the url, strip out any referrer codes, and then paste it into a separate browser.
Capitalism, or communism? What do you want? Innovation, or stagnation? You pick!
Besides not having to go through a fsck everytime a system crashes, what other features will we get with this ReiserFS? Will we still be restricted to that "32,000 subdirectories" limit?
You guys notice that eBay seems to have a big probelm keeping hard drives running, keeping their site up, and stuff like that? Wasn't that long ago that I kept reading about how eBay's servers died for over 8 hours at a time.
Also note how coincidental their announcement is to another bad news from Yahoo. Just a couple of days ago Yahoo told all their members that they'll be charging for auctions. What? Use Yahoo's bad news to sneak in another one, hoping to get away with it?
Yahoo's merely taking advantage of the the unjust ruling against them from the French government, to launch a new source of revenue.
Revenues from banner ads are declining to all-time lows, with many dotcoms going bust. Yahoo's just trying to adjust with the times to find better targetting methods to increase pofits.
This war on drugs is a waste of time. It's useless and it doesn't work. It's like throwing water at a gasoline fire.
Drugs are a real profit source for gangsters, mobsters, and other criminals. With this rich profit tap, these cockroaches of society thrive and grow.
So how about let's legalize it instead? By legalizing it we're taking away the underground's air supply. They will no longer be able to compete. Remember prohibition and how that backfired?
And once it's legalized, the government should choke this industry like that way the cigarette industry has been choked. Put huge taxes on drugs, make it hard to buy without proper id, limit its promotion, sue them whenever we can and should. But the strategy is, choke it enough so that it's as weak a market as possible, but at the same time, don't choke it to the point where it again becomes profitable for mob bosses to take over.
That my friends, is the magic bullet to this beast. Now all we have to do is REALLY WAKE UP and do something about it rather than "out of sight, out of mind".
If Microsoft starts seeing you move into their turf, they get scared. When they're scared they'll either buy you out or kill you by competing against you.
Time and time again they've done this... Netscape, Java, Novell, and now... Dreamcast/PS2.
It's like this. When they start seeing network adapters in these consoles, Microsoft start to imagine a day when these video game consoles slowly morph into set-top boxes... and then into personal pc's. This is what they're most afraid of... That these video game systems pushing their way into the consumer pc area, thus threatening their chokehold on operating systems, internet browsers, etc...
Even Bill Gates himself hinted this once. Asked what he'd like to do if he didn't run Microsoft, he said something like "I'll get into a $100 million dollar business that Microsoft isn't interested in". He's basically warning people not to step on his company's toes. Because once you do, they'll move in for the kill.
Remember a few years ago? Microsoft wasn't even interested in doing a video game console... and now suddenly here they are... Doesn't it surprise you that now they're into video game systems?
It's the same game with Netscape back in '96. At some lecture over at MIT he mentioned that Netscape was fast becoming a threat to Microsoft because at the time, Netscape commanded something like 96% of the browser market. And he predicted that they'll start adding "operating system" features into the browser bit by bit, until the day comes when Windows was no longer needed.
Look at Java. Same story. Operating-system-independent programming language? "I don't think so", whines Microshaft. Hmmm... let's kill it by first messing with the language itself by introducing our own "dirty" version of it, J++. And then let's make IE5+ NOT install the Java Virtual Machine by default... And then let's promote and install Macromedia's Flash onto all of our browsers so we encourage the market to use Flash instead of Java to do their "cute little" animations and other client-side stuff... A few years later? It worked. When was the last time you saw a java applet? And when you did, what happened to your browser? Did it not freeze up for like 20 seconds and piss you off?
Sad, but Microsoft indeed does deserve to be broken up.
Here are some thoughts next time you're fired rudely this way:
- talk loudly and say "hey are you trying to piss me off on purpose? Do you know that some people who've been treated this way have gone postal?" (say it in a way that it ain't a real threat, but sounds like it)
- upon getting a new job, install backdoors and think of pranks "in case" of that day
My friend has an aol account. I used it the other day and boy, spam doesn't get any worse than aol's own!
Upon logging in, there were a total of 4 popup windows! Yes 4! The first one, you had to cancel before you were even let in to aol. If you didn't acknowledge it you'd be prevented from logging in.
Then there's another one, the "welcome" screen, that you can't close. All you can do is minimize it.
But of course, Aol doesn't tell you you can disable 3 out of 4 of these annoying popup windows. To get to it you have to dig real deep into aol's "personal preferences".
Screw aol. They're the biggest hypocrites if I've ever seen one.
This is a very slippery slope and I'm not sure it's for the better that we all go down this road...
So now that France has set a precedent, which country's next? And what "moral" concept is next? Which website is next to be taken down?
If France doesn't like Yahoo's auctions they should just make their ISPs ban those listings instead.
I've personally have experience with this very issue. Hear me out:
I just recently bid on some Playstation 2's on eBay. Within hours of my bidding I was receiving offers to purchase ps2's via email from those who have gotten my email from the auction pages.
I was interested in a couple of the offers because they were lower in price compared to those being offered directly from ebay's auctions.
So I asked for their reference, aka. their eBay screen names. I wanted to see these sellers' feedbacks.
At the same time this was happening, I was still the highest bidder on one of the ps2 auctions.
Eventually I opted to pay a bit more for an extra level of security and confidence, rather than take a chance with an offline seller.
But it is true, this type of activity has the potential of ruining eBay's reputation, as it encourages bidders to abandon paying for auctions they've won. It can also create distrust in eBay's user feedbacks, as unscrupulous sellers can leverage their high user feedbacks to take advantage of offline buyers, since there's no way for victims of fraud to leave bad feedback for them on eBay's system.
On the other hand, it seems like eBay OWNS the good credit standing of all of their members, disallowing them from using it elsewhere. This isn't fair. Imagine if your good credit, credit that can get you financed for a house, a car, and a business, can be taken away in a second by the credit card companies. How would you feel then?
This I agree with because ftp's are usually for large files. If huge bandwidth costs with no returns for possible ad dollars are involved, it is definitely fair for them to not let you link directly without permission.
Think about hotlinking gif, jpg, and zip files. Would it be fair for someone to leech off you, give you no credit, and leave you with a huge bill?
On the other hand, html pages should be left alone and allowed for linking.
These morons are trying to turn the internet upside down. There's a very slippery slope if I've ever seen one. If they're allowed to enforce this, search engines will go broke, and the entire spirit of the internet will die. After all, why do we call this thing interNET, or world wide WEB?
Now ask yourself, would you rather this idea die or the internet die? Take your pick.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one that noticed Hannibal Lecter never chopped off his own hand? Either Clarice or Hannibal had the key all along. Go see the movie again and see if you see what I saw. Watch carefully after the police arrive.
Why don't the damn government make rebates illegal or something? It's like those pyramid schemes, it's just there to scam people.
But since I can't change the law, I always get back at these stupid companies some other way. For every $1 I get ripped off, I will punish them with $10. BestBuy and CompUSA are the worst rebate frauds.
This is what I do. I'd go buy something, open it, take something I need, and then return the damn MF item. I got burned by Iomega a few years back with their stupid Jazz drive rebate, so I went back a few months later, got myself another Jazz drive, took it home, opened it, and confiscated for myself an extra Jazz disk ($100 at the store if bought separately). Then I returned that damn drive and gave Iomega a middle finger salute!
[dislaimer: the above is nothing but a dream that I would love to carry out one day]
So is it now fair to say that we have lost yet another battle against those evil corporations
Evil? you gotta be kidding me you socialist freak. I keep seeing people bang on big corporations for being evil. How's a mom-n-pop shop not "evil"? Don't we all have greed? Don't we all want money? Evil... You just throw words out there expecting people to just believe you. Sigh...
There's a definite downturn in ad spending. 6 months ago Valueclick was more than happy to pay me month after month, but these days, with inventory still high but demand low, they're getting pickier and pickier. So a 2 months ago Valueclick suddenly terminates my account and doesn't pay me at all for my last 2 months there. Same has happened to adflight, everyone.net, etc...
I would pay $1 million to have a clone of Christina Aguilerra for myself :)
DAMN I shoulda stayed in Biochemistry instead of this computer shit.
What in the world does "ethical" and "moral" mean?
It's just a self-serving philosophy that protects and serves the interests of human beings, and only human beings. It's a way for people to get along together in a civilized manner.
Being ethical/moral doesn't mean it's "right". There is no such thing as being "right". We kill animals for food and for fun, is that "ethical"?
So, is cloning un-ethical? Yes, it is not advantageous to current human survival. Why? Because it aims to perfect Homo Sapiens in many fantastic ways... Heath, height, ability, looks, strength, EVERYTHING! It has the potential to evolve us into a new species, which means today's "Homo Sapien" might not exist in 500 years from now.
But, evolution is about the survival of the fittest. All it takes is 1 successful breeding to get the ball rolling. And then... how are we to stop it? Who doesn't want to have better looking, smarter, taller, stronger, faster, healthier children?
The thing is, companies with deep pockets will throw tons of money into tons of ridiculous patents at the USPTO, knowing full well that most of them will get rejected.
However, they also know there's a chance some of them might stick.
So under our current system, it doesn't matter how good the uspto is, some lame patents will always get through.
So how do we fix this? Simple. Have some way to PUNISH corporations/individuals who end up having their patents revoked due to obvious prior art. What better way to bend them over the knees than to hit them in the pockets where it really hurts?
Now why didn't etoy sue etoyS during the Christmas season and get them shut down during the holiday sales season? Sigh... if only it were 2 months ago that this happened.
God Damn government. It again is trying to increase its power by drawing the line further away from our freedom. Now it attempts to control our freedom to think and imagine.
Boy, it won't be long till they tell us we can't eat more than 2 Big Macs a week because it's bad for our health.
Right now it's between aol and microsoft. I don't like monopolies either, but don't you think microsoft has just way too much power? I'd rather aol have the monopoly on im and their isp service. At least that way Microsoft has some real competition.
Can you imagine if the fcc forced aol to open up their IM protocol? If they do it'd be 6 months away from microsofot taking it over. They'll embed it in their os, in all future versions of IE, in all Office suites, etc... You get the idea right? Remember how MS defeated Netscape?
Besides, the damn thing's free to download anyways. Why's MS so damn interested in the protocol? What do you think?
And what are the chances that the AntiTrust movie makers and writers will put their entire movie on the net for a free download?
Ironic isn't it?
What I used to do was stuff those envelopes with a bunch of confetti, then send it off to thos mf...
And when I get those damn telemarketers calling me at inappropriate times, I just sit there, let them babble, then proceed to ask them really stupid questions, one after another, till they get really frustrated and hang up. Ha ha... Wasted those bastards as much time as possible.
Also, am I the only one or have these damn telemarketers started using machines to do their dialing and check if anyone's home? Lately I keep getting those "hold on for an important message" after I pick up the phone and say "hello". Then 5 seconds later a damn telemarketer picks up and starts preaching their crap.
[Spoiler material. don't read me if you haven't seen the film]
I thought this film was totally ridiculous. It looks as though someone with a great idea for a movie just slapped a whole much of sequences together with cheap glue.
Seriously, if you were a multi-billionaire, would you really resort to murder? Do you know how much you risk? One mistake and you lose everything. And I mean everything! This movie would've been much better if they didn't resort to this low-level, Rambo-style plot. It would've been much more intellegient had NURF used other "non-murdering" ways to get what they wanted.
And those evil henchmen... where'd they come up with these people? You mean to tell me some simple blackmail would get them to all work for you to commit more crimes? And isn't Tim Robin's character afraid that they might come and blackmail him back for the evil things he's doing?
The security manager... oh that's even more ludicrous... Whenever something happens he just takes off out of his monitoring station, leaving everything un-attended? I think in real life he would've dispatched security guards to check things out while he stayed put to watch what's going on.
Just when things couldn't get any better, the writer/director got stuck... What to do when the security manager catches Filipe's character? Well how about this? We just add a one-liner, something like... "wanna know what really goes on in this place?"... and magically, Mr. Security joins up with the "good" guys. Sigh...
Those password screens... A few keystrokes and magical events take place. Just to break into an NT machine with a user password would take you hours our days, if you had some password cracker. No... all he needs is his 10 fingers and 50 keystrokes.
Let me ramble on...
After Filipe finds out about what might really be going on, who does he go to? Some co-worker (that black-haired girl) who works for Mr. Evil? Isn't that the stupidest thing to do? You trust no one, yet you spill your guts out to someone who works on the inside?
Last but not least, in the beginning of the movie when they talked of open source, I just had to laugh... Yeah, we'll give the source out to the world for free, and get paid for "support"! After all why do we have capitalism instead of communism? Seems like in the movie, greed is evil (capitalism), and giving everything away for free is good (communism). Wake up already!
I come from a webmaster's perspective. Hear me out:
I have a site. My site generates more than 15gb of traffic per day. To accommodate for this traffic I have set up a colocation account with a local ISP. Here's a breakdown of my costs:
- I pay $1800 a month on my bandwidth and cabinet space.
- I spend 5 hours a day on my site. This amounts to 150 hours a month.
- I have 5 servers, which I paid out of my own pocket. Including the load-balancing software and other 3rd party software, I've spent over $20,000 on hardware/software.
- When my site goes down at 3 in the morning, I am paged on my cell phone. I have to drag my ass out of bed, drive down to the colo facility with my tools hoping it's just something minor. If it's major, I have to stay there until it's fixed! Whether it's 1 hour, 10 hours, or 20 hours, I gotta make it work. This alone is worth tons of money, really. I mean, what would you expect for a salary if your employer said "you're on call 24/7. If things ever break, you don't go home till it's working again".
Not so cheap heh? On top of all this, I have to also deal with ad brokers till I'm sick in the stomach. I've had over 10 ad brokers cancel/reject my site because of my content. It's mostly forum content and that's considered "undesirable" to them (since it's user-posted content, and thus "low quality"). In fact, at this moment I don't have any advertisers. I'm paying everything out of my own pocket.
Things didn't use to be this way. 6 months ago my traffic yielded me $8000 a month. Subtract out my costs and it was still profitable. Today? $0 income and all those costs? I don't even know why I'm still operating. Maybe it's because I'm hoping for a brighter day... Maybe it's because I don't want to disappoint my 60,000 website members.
So to all you folks who only care about blocking out ads, leeching the net for free, thinking only of yourselves... Please... take a moment and imagine yourself in my shoes. How would you feel then?
This is all coming from me, a guy who, before his website business days, used to hate all ad banners, who blocked all cookie access, who, if interested in an ad (if ever), would copy the url, strip out any referrer codes, and then paste it into a separate browser.
Capitalism, or communism? What do you want? Innovation, or stagnation? You pick!
Besides not having to go through a fsck everytime a system crashes, what other features will we get with this ReiserFS? Will we still be restricted to that "32,000 subdirectories" limit?
You guys notice that eBay seems to have a big probelm keeping hard drives running, keeping their site up, and stuff like that? Wasn't that long ago that I kept reading about how eBay's servers died for over 8 hours at a time.
Also note how coincidental their announcement is to another bad news from Yahoo. Just a couple of days ago Yahoo told all their members that they'll be charging for auctions. What? Use Yahoo's bad news to sneak in another one, hoping to get away with it?
Lame...
Yahoo's merely taking advantage of the the unjust ruling against them from the French government, to launch a new source of revenue.
Revenues from banner ads are declining to all-time lows, with many dotcoms going bust. Yahoo's just trying to adjust with the times to find better targetting methods to increase pofits.
This war on drugs is a waste of time. It's useless and it doesn't work. It's like throwing water at a gasoline fire.
Drugs are a real profit source for gangsters, mobsters, and other criminals. With this rich profit tap, these cockroaches of society thrive and grow.
So how about let's legalize it instead? By legalizing it we're taking away the underground's air supply. They will no longer be able to compete. Remember prohibition and how that backfired?
And once it's legalized, the government should choke this industry like that way the cigarette industry has been choked. Put huge taxes on drugs, make it hard to buy without proper id, limit its promotion, sue them whenever we can and should. But the strategy is, choke it enough so that it's as weak a market as possible, but at the same time, don't choke it to the point where it again becomes profitable for mob bosses to take over.
That my friends, is the magic bullet to this beast. Now all we have to do is REALLY WAKE UP and do something about it rather than "out of sight, out of mind".
If Microsoft starts seeing you move into their turf, they get scared. When they're scared they'll either buy you out or kill you by competing against you.
Time and time again they've done this... Netscape, Java, Novell, and now... Dreamcast/PS2.
It's like this. When they start seeing network adapters in these consoles, Microsoft start to imagine a day when these video game consoles slowly morph into set-top boxes... and then into personal pc's. This is what they're most afraid of... That these video game systems pushing their way into the consumer pc area, thus threatening their chokehold on operating systems, internet browsers, etc...
Even Bill Gates himself hinted this once. Asked what he'd like to do if he didn't run Microsoft, he said something like "I'll get into a $100 million dollar business that Microsoft isn't interested in". He's basically warning people not to step on his company's toes. Because once you do, they'll move in for the kill.
Remember a few years ago? Microsoft wasn't even interested in doing a video game console... and now suddenly here they are... Doesn't it surprise you that now they're into video game systems?
It's the same game with Netscape back in '96. At some lecture over at MIT he mentioned that Netscape was fast becoming a threat to Microsoft because at the time, Netscape commanded something like 96% of the browser market. And he predicted that they'll start adding "operating system" features into the browser bit by bit, until the day comes when Windows was no longer needed.
Look at Java. Same story. Operating-system-independent programming language? "I don't think so", whines Microshaft. Hmmm... let's kill it by first messing with the language itself by introducing our own "dirty" version of it, J++. And then let's make IE5+ NOT install the Java Virtual Machine by default... And then let's promote and install Macromedia's Flash onto all of our browsers so we encourage the market to use Flash instead of Java to do their "cute little" animations and other client-side stuff... A few years later? It worked. When was the last time you saw a java applet? And when you did, what happened to your browser? Did it not freeze up for like 20 seconds and piss you off?
Sad, but Microsoft indeed does deserve to be broken up.
Here are some thoughts next time you're fired rudely this way: - talk loudly and say "hey are you trying to piss me off on purpose? Do you know that some people who've been treated this way have gone postal?" (say it in a way that it ain't a real threat, but sounds like it) - upon getting a new job, install backdoors and think of pranks "in case" of that day
My friend has an aol account. I used it the other day and boy, spam doesn't get any worse than aol's own!
Upon logging in, there were a total of 4 popup windows! Yes 4! The first one, you had to cancel before you were even let in to aol. If you didn't acknowledge it you'd be prevented from logging in.
Then there's another one, the "welcome" screen, that you can't close. All you can do is minimize it.
But of course, Aol doesn't tell you you can disable 3 out of 4 of these annoying popup windows. To get to it you have to dig real deep into aol's "personal preferences".
Screw aol. They're the biggest hypocrites if I've ever seen one.
This is a very slippery slope and I'm not sure it's for the better that we all go down this road... So now that France has set a precedent, which country's next? And what "moral" concept is next? Which website is next to be taken down? If France doesn't like Yahoo's auctions they should just make their ISPs ban those listings instead.
I've personally have experience with this very issue. Hear me out:
I just recently bid on some Playstation 2's on eBay. Within hours of my bidding I was receiving offers to purchase ps2's via email from those who have gotten my email from the auction pages.
I was interested in a couple of the offers because they were lower in price compared to those being offered directly from ebay's auctions.
So I asked for their reference, aka. their eBay screen names. I wanted to see these sellers' feedbacks.
At the same time this was happening, I was still the highest bidder on one of the ps2 auctions.
Eventually I opted to pay a bit more for an extra level of security and confidence, rather than take a chance with an offline seller.
But it is true, this type of activity has the potential of ruining eBay's reputation, as it encourages bidders to abandon paying for auctions they've won. It can also create distrust in eBay's user feedbacks, as unscrupulous sellers can leverage their high user feedbacks to take advantage of offline buyers, since there's no way for victims of fraud to leave bad feedback for them on eBay's system.
On the other hand, it seems like eBay OWNS the good credit standing of all of their members, disallowing them from using it elsewhere. This isn't fair. Imagine if your good credit, credit that can get you financed for a house, a car, and a business, can be taken away in a second by the credit card companies. How would you feel then?
This I agree with because ftp's are usually for large files. If huge bandwidth costs with no returns for possible ad dollars are involved, it is definitely fair for them to not let you link directly without permission.
Think about hotlinking gif, jpg, and zip files. Would it be fair for someone to leech off you, give you no credit, and leave you with a huge bill?
On the other hand, html pages should be left alone and allowed for linking.
These morons are trying to turn the internet upside down. There's a very slippery slope if I've ever seen one. If they're allowed to enforce this, search engines will go broke, and the entire spirit of the internet will die. After all, why do we call this thing interNET, or world wide WEB?
Now ask yourself, would you rather this idea die or the internet die? Take your pick.