So if you lose your money there, whether through a bug or through fraud, you're screwed.
Also since the "country of second life" is not part any one country or the U.N., there are no federal or international laws applicable in the word of second life. This is the problem with virtual property.
Technically money is virtual as well since the little pieces of paper you carry around are technically worthless, but at least paper money is backed by the Government which has rules protecting you from theft. That's why First Life is better than Second Life.
I use the pay version of Yahoo which has "SpamGuard Plus". It is supposed to be a learning filter (Bayesian filtering I think). Yahoo used to have excellent filtering. I rarely if ever got spam in my Inbox, even when I was getting literally hundreds of spam messages a day in my Spam folder.
Sometime in September of October this all changed. About 50% of spam was getting through and what was more annoying is that most of it was coming from other Yahoo users and they were all hard core porn spam. These weren't spoofed from addresses, they were actually coming from Yahoo since the DomainKey headers were valid. No matter how much I hit the Spam button on them they kept coming and they all looked very similar. I forwarded them to Yahoo and got responses claiming they were closing the accounts, yet they still kept coming. It got to the point where I finally set up a filter so that any email coming with @yahoo.co in the from header that wasn't specifically sent to my email address was trashed.
Recently the amount of spam from real Yahoo addresses has dropped (though not gone away). Now I'm getting Spam from Spoofed Yahoo addresses, mostly selling watches or something, but fortunately my filter takes care of most of them.
Spam from Hotmail and other various places still shows up. More spam is getting through than a year ago, but not nearly as much as last month. I'm still not sure why there isn't a way to filter out all those Nigerian bank scams and stock dump scams since they all look very similar.
Hopefully Yahoo works on bettering their spam filters since they definitely don't work nearly as well as they say they do.
I do have 2 Gmail accounts which I don't use. They have some spam in them when I check them every now and then. Surprisingly the account I get the least amount of Spam at is my Comcast account which I never use.
A release candidate should be identical to the actual release; that's why it's called a "release candidate" and not a beta version. The only things that would be changed between the RC and the release are any major bugs such as crashes, exploits, etc. Any performance tweaks would have already been done by the time it hit release candidate status. Similarly any debugging code that would slow things down would have also been removed.
As a TD Ameritrade account holder I find this unacceptable. Not only do they have unauthorized code running on their local systems with access to customers social security numbers and the like, but they don't even tell their customers when this happens other than issuing a generic press release in which they say they think the hackers only got email addresses despite the fact that the data base the hackers had access to also had birth dates, social security numbers and everything else necessary to steal account holders' identities.
How does unauthorized code even get into a financial institutions systems? The banking systems should never be accessible via public networks, only private ones, so this should never have happened.
What exactly is TD Ameritrade doing about this? TD Ameritrade should at least give it's customers free credit monitoring.
I can't speak for other devices, but the S3 was designed to be idiot proof. There is only 2 places to insert the cards with a big label saying which slot to use first. Basically if someone can make toast, they can install a cable card. After that the software does the rest. A screen pops up with the numbers that need to be given the the Cable Company.
It's impossible to insert the cards in backwards (they won't fit) so the worst someone could do is not figure out where to put the cards or call the wrong numbers in. In which case Comcast could send out a technician. There's no reason to not allow customers to install it themselves.
My experience has been that the reason probably is more of a training issue. My CARDs lost provisioning (completely my fault) and I figured I'd call in to give Comcast the new pairing numbers. Well it took 4 calls, speaking to a manager (who told me I needed a service call) until I finally found someone who would take the pairing numbers (after originally telling me it wasn't possible and then only after I verified my last 4 digits of my social). The whole technical process took a few minutes, yet I had spent hours on the phone. This indicates training or policies problems more than actual user intelligence problems.
First off, popup ads were never implemented. TiVo tested them on a few people, found they didn't work well and scrapped them. I don't know why people always bring this up since there hasn't been a popup ad on a TiVo in over 2 years. There's far more ads on the cable box Comcast gives me (they're all over the guide), than I ever see on my TiVo.
Second, TiVo is the best known DVR out there and the most successful purchasable one there is. When Comcast starts selling their own HD DVR that's as good as TiVo (which will never happen) I'm sure you'll read it here.
Third, TiVo is one of the easiest DVRs to use which is probably why they won an emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Enhanced Television Programming.
It's not a referrer check, but a form of id check to make sure you loaded the page first. If you load the comment preference page and save it and then with the page still open, edit the saved page open it in a new tab and the submit it, it will work. But basically you have to go the the preference page and save it, every time you want to do the trick, you can't just keep reusing the old saved page.
I found a way to enable Discussions2 if you previously signed up for the Univ of Michigan testing, but it isn't straight forward.
There are two ways to do it.
1. If you are using Firefox, you can install the Firebug Addon and then go to the comments preference page and click on the firebug icon in the status bar. Then click "Inspect" Firebug button and click on the "University of Michigan Testing" button and click on the HTML tab in Firebug. Change the value from "uofm" to "slashdot". Then make sure the "University of Michigan Testing" is selected and submit the page.
2. If you can't or won't use Firebug, you can do it manually by going to the comment page and saving the page on to your computer and editing the HTML to change the "uofm" value to "slashdot" and then change the submit URL from "/users.pl" to "http://slashdot.org/users.pl". Then open this page in your browser and select the "University of Michigan Testing" style option and submit the page.
Either way, if you did it correctly, then neither option under "Discussion Style" will be checked and you will be using the new Discussion2 style. You can then use the Discussion2 style without having to wait for a fix.
I happened to be at my parent's house when Microsoft pushed out this update. I saw the update wanted to install so I rebooted their machine and the error popped up immediately. Since I had been doing some work on their machine I originally thought it was something I did until I read the KB associated with the patch.
Good thing I happened to be there since there's no way they'd have figured out what had happened. I might have been able to figure it out eventually, but probably wouldn't have associated it with the patch right away without having had been there.
Microsoft should have just included the hhctrl.ocx update in the patch since from the KB, they know they are incompatible.
I found this out when I got a TiVo Series 3. I noticed that every show I recorded, including ones that were deemed copyright cleared (eg: cable in the classroom) were marked as "Copy Restricted" on my TiVo. This means that the show cannot be saved or copied off the Tivo.
I found out this was because my cable company was setting the CCI flag to 0x2 for all channels in my cable system with the exception of local broadcast stations. This means my local cable company was overriding the wishes of the content provider (in this case Cable in the Classroom) and copy protecting the content.
When I complained to my cable provider, Comcast, about them blanketly applying the CCI flag of 0x2 to everything they basically told me to shut up and take it.
Yes they said they are flying them in, instead of shipping them in. All that does is get the consoles here faster after they've been built. It doesn't make them build the consoles any faster or make more of them. I still say the reason the prices dropped is that there are thousands and thousands of them on eBay. There were literally 20 PS3 auctions expiring every minute the other day. Now it's down to about 2 to 5 PS3 auctions expiring per minute and a good number of them have no bids because their starting price is over $1500. I'm talking the 60 GB model, not the 20 GB one.
I do agree that they will rise up the closer it gets to Christmas, but I don't think they'll get back to the $3000+ per console that they were at launch since the "gotta have it first no matter the cost" people have already bid and got theirs leaving the more sensible (yet still stupid) people who aren't bidding as much.
I've noticed that shortly after the release the prices for PS3s on eBay dropped sharply so much that you can pick one up for less than $1000 if your observant. Basically with over a hundred thousand PS3s on eBay the prices were bound to drop.
Oh and taking it out of the box and using it will definitely cause the price you can sell it for to go down even more.
Actually the grandparent is correct. The TiVo can transfer any MPEG2 encoded video file from a PC running the TiVo Desktop software (or Galleon). The video file can be viewed while it is transferring. It works very well. The downside is that since TiVo only supports MPEG2, the file sizes are quite large and the transfer time can take a while. The TiVo S3, which is supposed to be released in about a week can play MPG4 formatted videos, but it hasn't been confirmed whether it will support the PC to TiVo video transfer feature.
Do what I did. Just log into their routers (since most people don't turn on encryption or even change the default password) and change all the channels. Now everyone else will conflict, but you'll have a channel all to yourself.:)
DirectTV has nothing to fear from TiVo
on
DirecTV's New HD-DVR
·
· Score: 4, Informative
DirectTV and TiVo came to an agreement earlier this year where DirectTV agreed to support the DirectTV TiVos until 2009. In return TiVo and DirectTV agreed not to sue each other for any DVR patent infringements.
Actually the Spanish American War (federal excise) tax was finally repealed a few months ago. Not only that but it was retroactive to 3 years ago. It took over a hundred years to do, but it did happen.
Both customers and stores learned their lesson with the XBox 360. Many people who pre-ordered the XBox 360 were not getting theirs until 2 or 3 month because of supply problems. The PS3 is coming out worldwide in November meaning even if you pre-order it your chances of getting it before the holiday season are very slim.
It also seems that stores don't want to go through this hastle again either. I went into a local Gamestop and they won't even take pre-orders on the PS3 because they don't expect to get more than 1 or 2 of them. Stores like Walmart, that get a larger number of consoles, already don't pre-sell consoles.
In other words, it's not likely this will work unless you are very lucky.
For one thing UMD wasn't licensed to any other manufacturers so the only device that can play a UMD movie is the PSP. This isn't a problem with Blu-ray.
Second, UMD is a Sony only proprietary format. Blu-ray was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association of which Sony is just one member. The last media format that was co-developed by Sony was a whopping success. You might have heard of it, it was the DVD (Sony was a founding member of the DVD Forum).
So as you can see the UMD was basically DOA while Blu-Ray has a good chance of becoming the next standard.
I felt like I was in a time warp last night. My text took minutes to show up in chat. My actions took about 10 seconds to complete (while MOBS had no such limitations) and I got disconnected a few times.
Of course trying to find out what the problem was was pointless since the WOW website was also having problems. Even now, there's nothing on the WOW site or in the forums about the problem. The supposed post by the GM appears to have vanished and the realm status page lists everything as a-ok.
Maybe someone should send the good Senators Professor Jenkin's study debunking the myth that video games cause children to become aggressive homicidal sociopaths as mentioned here on Tuesday.
Slashdot Mirror
So if you lose your money there, whether through a bug or through fraud, you're screwed. Also since the "country of second life" is not part any one country or the U.N., there are no federal or international laws applicable in the word of second life. This is the problem with virtual property.
Technically money is virtual as well since the little pieces of paper you carry around are technically worthless, but at least paper money is backed by the Government which has rules protecting you from theft. That's why First Life is better than Second Life.
I use the pay version of Yahoo which has "SpamGuard Plus". It is supposed to be a learning filter (Bayesian filtering I think). Yahoo used to have excellent filtering. I rarely if ever got spam in my Inbox, even when I was getting literally hundreds of spam messages a day in my Spam folder.
Sometime in September of October this all changed. About 50% of spam was getting through and what was more annoying is that most of it was coming from other Yahoo users and they were all hard core porn spam. These weren't spoofed from addresses, they were actually coming from Yahoo since the DomainKey headers were valid. No matter how much I hit the Spam button on them they kept coming and they all looked very similar. I forwarded them to Yahoo and got responses claiming they were closing the accounts, yet they still kept coming. It got to the point where I finally set up a filter so that any email coming with @yahoo.co in the from header that wasn't specifically sent to my email address was trashed.
Recently the amount of spam from real Yahoo addresses has dropped (though not gone away). Now I'm getting Spam from Spoofed Yahoo addresses, mostly selling watches or something, but fortunately my filter takes care of most of them.
Spam from Hotmail and other various places still shows up. More spam is getting through than a year ago, but not nearly as much as last month. I'm still not sure why there isn't a way to filter out all those Nigerian bank scams and stock dump scams since they all look very similar.
Hopefully Yahoo works on bettering their spam filters since they definitely don't work nearly as well as they say they do.
I do have 2 Gmail accounts which I don't use. They have some spam in them when I check them every now and then. Surprisingly the account I get the least amount of Spam at is my Comcast account which I never use.
A release candidate should be identical to the actual release; that's why it's called a "release candidate" and not a beta version. The only things that would be changed between the RC and the release are any major bugs such as crashes, exploits, etc. Any performance tweaks would have already been done by the time it hit release candidate status. Similarly any debugging code that would slow things down would have also been removed.
As a TD Ameritrade account holder I find this unacceptable. Not only do they have unauthorized code running on their local systems with access to customers social security numbers and the like, but they don't even tell their customers when this happens other than issuing a generic press release in which they say they think the hackers only got email addresses despite the fact that the data base the hackers had access to also had birth dates, social security numbers and everything else necessary to steal account holders' identities.
How does unauthorized code even get into a financial institutions systems? The banking systems should never be accessible via public networks, only private ones, so this should never have happened.
What exactly is TD Ameritrade doing about this? TD Ameritrade should at least give it's customers free credit monitoring.
I'd sue too if I was beat by these guys.
According to ONN the Internet already crashed.
I can't speak for other devices, but the S3 was designed to be idiot proof. There is only 2 places to insert the cards with a big label saying which slot to use first. Basically if someone can make toast, they can install a cable card. After that the software does the rest. A screen pops up with the numbers that need to be given the the Cable Company.
It's impossible to insert the cards in backwards (they won't fit) so the worst someone could do is not figure out where to put the cards or call the wrong numbers in. In which case Comcast could send out a technician. There's no reason to not allow customers to install it themselves.
My experience has been that the reason probably is more of a training issue. My CARDs lost provisioning (completely my fault) and I figured I'd call in to give Comcast the new pairing numbers. Well it took 4 calls, speaking to a manager (who told me I needed a service call) until I finally found someone who would take the pairing numbers (after originally telling me it wasn't possible and then only after I verified my last 4 digits of my social). The whole technical process took a few minutes, yet I had spent hours on the phone. This indicates training or policies problems more than actual user intelligence problems.
First off, popup ads were never implemented. TiVo tested them on a few people, found they didn't work well and scrapped them. I don't know why people always bring this up since there hasn't been a popup ad on a TiVo in over 2 years. There's far more ads on the cable box Comcast gives me (they're all over the guide), than I ever see on my TiVo.
Second, TiVo is the best known DVR out there and the most successful purchasable one there is. When Comcast starts selling their own HD DVR that's as good as TiVo (which will never happen) I'm sure you'll read it here.
Third, TiVo is one of the easiest DVRs to use which is probably why they won an emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Enhanced Television Programming.
It's not a referrer check, but a form of id check to make sure you loaded the page first. If you load the comment preference page and save it and then with the page still open, edit the saved page open it in a new tab and the submit it, it will work. But basically you have to go the the preference page and save it, every time you want to do the trick, you can't just keep reusing the old saved page.
I found a way to enable Discussions2 if you previously signed up for the Univ of Michigan testing, but it isn't straight forward.
There are two ways to do it.
1. If you are using Firefox, you can install the Firebug Addon and then go to the comments preference page and click on the firebug icon in the status bar. Then click "Inspect" Firebug button and click on the "University of Michigan Testing" button and click on the HTML tab in Firebug. Change the value from "uofm" to "slashdot". Then make sure the "University of Michigan Testing" is selected and submit the page.
2. If you can't or won't use Firebug, you can do it manually by going to the comment page and saving the page on to your computer and editing the HTML to change the "uofm" value to "slashdot" and then change the submit URL from "/users.pl" to "http://slashdot.org/users.pl". Then open this page in your browser and select the "University of Michigan Testing" style option and submit the page.
Either way, if you did it correctly, then neither option under "Discussion Style" will be checked and you will be using the new Discussion2 style. You can then use the Discussion2 style without having to wait for a fix.
I've got the same problem. No option for Discussion2.
I happened to be at my parent's house when Microsoft pushed out this update. I saw the update wanted to install so I rebooted their machine and the error popped up immediately. Since I had been doing some work on their machine I originally thought it was something I did until I read the KB associated with the patch.
Good thing I happened to be there since there's no way they'd have figured out what had happened. I might have been able to figure it out eventually, but probably wouldn't have associated it with the patch right away without having had been there.
Microsoft should have just included the hhctrl.ocx update in the patch since from the KB, they know they are incompatible.
I found this out when I got a TiVo Series 3. I noticed that every show I recorded, including ones that were deemed copyright cleared (eg: cable in the classroom) were marked as "Copy Restricted" on my TiVo. This means that the show cannot be saved or copied off the Tivo.
I found out this was because my cable company was setting the CCI flag to 0x2 for all channels in my cable system with the exception of local broadcast stations. This means my local cable company was overriding the wishes of the content provider (in this case Cable in the Classroom) and copy protecting the content.
Other people have been restricted from even recording a channel to TiVo because the CCI flag was set to 0x3.
When I complained to my cable provider, Comcast, about them blanketly applying the CCI flag of 0x2 to everything they basically told me to shut up and take it.
Yes they said they are flying them in, instead of shipping them in. All that does is get the consoles here faster after they've been built. It doesn't make them build the consoles any faster or make more of them. I still say the reason the prices dropped is that there are thousands and thousands of them on eBay. There were literally 20 PS3 auctions expiring every minute the other day. Now it's down to about 2 to 5 PS3 auctions expiring per minute and a good number of them have no bids because their starting price is over $1500. I'm talking the 60 GB model, not the 20 GB one.
I do agree that they will rise up the closer it gets to Christmas, but I don't think they'll get back to the $3000+ per console that they were at launch since the "gotta have it first no matter the cost" people have already bid and got theirs leaving the more sensible (yet still stupid) people who aren't bidding as much.
I've noticed that shortly after the release the prices for PS3s on eBay dropped sharply so much that you can pick one up for less than $1000 if your observant. Basically with over a hundred thousand PS3s on eBay the prices were bound to drop.
Oh and taking it out of the box and using it will definitely cause the price you can sell it for to go down even more.
Actually the grandparent is correct. The TiVo can transfer any MPEG2 encoded video file from a PC running the TiVo Desktop software (or Galleon). The video file can be viewed while it is transferring. It works very well. The downside is that since TiVo only supports MPEG2, the file sizes are quite large and the transfer time can take a while. The TiVo S3, which is supposed to be released in about a week can play MPG4 formatted videos, but it hasn't been confirmed whether it will support the PC to TiVo video transfer feature.
I have a Chase Circuit City credit card. Why am I first hearing about this on Slashdot instead of from an email from Chase?
Do what I did. Just log into their routers (since most people don't turn on encryption or even change the default password) and change all the channels. Now everyone else will conflict, but you'll have a channel all to yourself. :)
DirectTV and TiVo came to an agreement earlier this year where DirectTV agreed to support the DirectTV TiVos until 2009. In return TiVo and DirectTV agreed not to sue each other for any DVR patent infringements.
So DirectTV won't suffer the same fate as Dish.
Actually the Spanish American War (federal excise) tax was finally repealed a few months ago. Not only that but it was retroactive to 3 years ago. It took over a hundred years to do, but it did happen.
So can the gf poster get all he wants now?
Both customers and stores learned their lesson with the XBox 360. Many people who pre-ordered the XBox 360 were not getting theirs until 2 or 3 month because of supply problems. The PS3 is coming out worldwide in November meaning even if you pre-order it your chances of getting it before the holiday season are very slim.
It also seems that stores don't want to go through this hastle again either. I went into a local Gamestop and they won't even take pre-orders on the PS3 because they don't expect to get more than 1 or 2 of them. Stores like Walmart, that get a larger number of consoles, already don't pre-sell consoles.
In other words, it's not likely this will work unless you are very lucky.
UMD isn't anything like Blu-ray.
For one thing UMD wasn't licensed to any other manufacturers so the only device that can play a UMD movie is the PSP. This isn't a problem with Blu-ray.
Second, UMD is a Sony only proprietary format. Blu-ray was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association of which Sony is just one member. The last media format that was co-developed by Sony was a whopping success. You might have heard of it, it was the DVD (Sony was a founding member of the DVD Forum).
So as you can see the UMD was basically DOA while Blu-Ray has a good chance of becoming the next standard.
I felt like I was in a time warp last night. My text took minutes to show up in chat. My actions took about 10 seconds to complete (while MOBS had no such limitations) and I got disconnected a few times.
Of course trying to find out what the problem was was pointless since the WOW website was also having problems. Even now, there's nothing on the WOW site or in the forums about the problem. The supposed post by the GM appears to have vanished and the realm status page lists everything as a-ok.
His conclusions once again are completely incorrect.
4 17431.aspx
See the following post for why this occured.
http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2006/01/13/
Maybe someone should send the good Senators Professor Jenkin's study debunking the myth that video games cause children to become aggressive homicidal sociopaths as mentioned here on Tuesday.
a rding=issue
Better yet, why doesn't everone send them it.
Clinton, Hillary- (D - NY)
476 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-4451
Web Form: http://clinton.senate.gov/contact
Lieberman, Joseph- (D - CT)
706 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-4041
Web Form: http://lieberman.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm?reg
While you're at it, why not contact your Senators and tell them to oppose the bill.