When they answer their phone all they would hear is the sound of the computer trying to connect (not too fun).
No, they'd hear the sound of a computer listening for a connection opportunity (i.e. silence). Still not very entertaining, but not very annoying, either.
That particular idiom really bothers me. The fact is, I am not at all sorry that I'm not interested in listening to a sales pitch while the Fettucini Robusto curdles on the serving chalice. I am not sorry that I have to rebuff the caller. I am not sorry that the caller will not make his/her shift quota. <peewee>I'm not sorry!</peewee>
The general idiom of expressing questions with the expectation of a negative answer ("You wouldn't by chance have...?") is a close second, and both seem to have descended from colloquial English (the British version) common discourse, which presupposes disappointment of the initiator, that he may be "surprised" by the beneficial outcome. "I'm sorry, but..." "Oh, not at all!"
Seriously, do you really believe it takes these companies 6-8 months to process your opt-out request when you get added to their calling list almost instantly?
Absolutely! But you have to understand how they process such remove requests. Step 1 is to place the request into a 90-day suspense file to make sure they don't inadvertantly remove someone who really wants to be bothered.
True story: The local fish-wrapper was calling my house twice a week for at least 3 months. The paper's name showed up on CNID, so it was easy to let 'em go to voicemail, but it was annoying. So I tried *69 one time and got "The number that last called you cannot be reached". Next step, I dialed the number shown and sure enough, I got through. I said "I'd really appreciate it if you would stop calling me." The rep took my number and then asked "Would you like this number to be blocked for 3 months, 6 months or a year?" "How about forever?" "A year it is. Thank you for calling."
Thier usual tactic is to use the phone number of the Portland Police or Fire Department or to use my phone number as the spoof when calling me.
Around Cincinnati, I usually see 0000000000. One outfit actually did something different: 0000000009! I've been tempted to make reference to this in my OGM, but why waste the creativity?
Imagine, if you will, that someone starts using a laser to project ads on the windows on your house
Imagine, if you will, the magnitude of the liability lawsuit brought against the manufacturers of products so advertised, as well as the companies that produce the equipment to project those ads. Telephones don't cause blindness. Perhaps reductio ad absurdum isn't your long suit?
on the other hand I'm greatful that I can so often sneak a hangup into there...
Sneak a hangup in? Do you have some overactive politeness gene or something? I have no problem at all hanging up right in the middle of their opening sentence (although sometimes I just have to slip in a verbal barb before dropping the switchhook).
all 50million people are asked to write in saying why they do not like telemarketing.
Excuse me? It's my phone and my time. I will be damned if I will be required to "explain" to some faceless judiciary why I don't wish to allow telemarketing scum to invade my home and waste my time. The right to free speech does not imply the responsibility to listen, and commercial speech is considered a lesser entity than individual speech.
I forsee a time not far off when the government has been sufficiently commercialized as to require citizen-units to pay attention to advertising (probably dolled up as some sort of "save the economy" jihad). But unless and until that happens, let me finish my dinner in peace, ferchrissake!
The important thing to remember about ISO9001 is that it's perfectly OK for an ISO9001 shop to fling completed motherboards frisbee style across the warehouse so that it hits the wall and lands in the pile for packaging/shipping as long as that is the written procedure.
Having lived through an ISO9001 certification, I discovered that you don't even need a written procedure. You just need to document its absence.
What's needed is a method where the voter can verify his vote and the reported totals without sacrificing his anonymity.
Dead simple. Take a SHA1 hash of the voter's name and address, a secret string Joe entered at the polling place and the candidates he voted for. Publish the list of hashes in the paper. Joe Voter calculates the hash himself and looks for it in the list. If it's not there, someone is playng games. You need the secret string because Joe's name and address are public knowledge.
Then they started charging $50/year until the late 90's when they lowered that price to $35/year.
Not quite. Once NetSol began charging for domains, it was always $35 a year, but initially NetSol required a 2-year term plus a $30 setup fee to register a domain. That persisted at least into 1996, when I registered my first one.
While I agree with you in spirit, I disagree in practice. The reason I disagree in practice is because it's through this exact right that the existing recording industry binds musicians to something resembling slavery.
I agree with you that copyright law needs rethinking, especially the length of protection. (Life of the author is OK, but the effectively perpetual term now in effect is simply silly) But preventing assignment of rights based solely on the ability of an industry to victimize copyright holders is the Nanny State at its worst.
Technology is enabling even the Average Joe to distribute his creative content without the necessity of a major distributor contract. It may be true now that "your chances are better with a major label", but that will not always be the case. And anyway, if someone wants to voluntarily accept such indenturement, I believe it is their God-given right to do so. It's a simple marketplace solution. Artists can wager their rights that a major corporation will increase their chances of success. Whether that is a good wager is up to the artist.
221 snubby2-wcwest Snubby Mail Rejector Daemon v1.3 closing transmission channel
I just hit Enter 5 times. It's still possible that they are collecting MAIL FROM fields as a quasi-verified email address list, but it doesn't look like anything deeper is going on. You got the 550 at the DATA command only because you forgot to HELO. I'd guess snubby is expecting HELO, MAIL FROM, RCPT TO, RSET, QUIT.
A few years ago, I lived in an apartment complex that cut a deal with some satellite outfit. The ~$30 cable bill suddenly went up to a ~$50 satellite bill, plus a $10 "provider fee" and a $150 equipment deposit. Cable was no longer an option; the local cable company was ordered to physically remove their outside plant from the property. But the most insulting part was that they pulled this switch 2 weeks before the cable company started offering cable-modem internet.
I was, how shall I say.. pissed off! I contacted the FCC and was told that while they could not prevent me from setting up a dish (provided that my apartment had an apropriate skyview), they had no obligation to allow me access to cable TV. Oh, and cable internet was not a regulated service, so the FCC had no jurisdiction over it.
So I got hold of the Federal Trade Commission, to ask if this weren't some sort of restraint-of-trade. The FTC told me that ROS actions must be pursued by the victim (meaning the cable company, in this case) and anyway, the FCC was responsible for regulating cable.
Sooo.... I called the cable company, who told me that yes, it sucked, and no, the parent company didn't care about losing a mere 0.5% of its customers and anyway, internet was just a sideline.
So far my site is ad-free, and I'd prefer to keep it that way.
People pay for convenience. Ever buy milk at a 7-11? If you want to run a site completely on your own terms, you have to run your own site, which means a few bucks here and there for things like hosting and a domain name.
Google has a business plan, unlike 97% of the dot.bombers, and one way or another, they need to pay for that gigantic farm of servers and spiders. They'll make money from Blogger, count on it. And if that means inserting ads in your blog, then you'll have to decide what control is worth to you.
As are b2 and Movable Type, among others. I always thought that the appeal of LiveJournal was that it doesn't need separate hosting, and perhaps some "snob appeal" in that free accounts are available only to the invited.
I also agree that it is not yet feasable, but as copyright becomes increasingly impossible to enforce -- as I believe it will be in the absence of a totalitarian regime needed to police ALL communications...
Now there's a thought! Could the copyright jihad be part of a multi-pronged approach to advance a totalitarian regime, alongside CAPPS II and the War On Some Terror?
Seriously, though... why is it that downloading a song does not count as a "performance" for the purposes of mechanical royalties? Why does the music industry, as personified by the RIAA, insist that p2p distribution and webcasting are somehow fundamentally different from radio and TV broadcasting of that same material? As the post above pointed out, ASCAP royalties are actually reasonable (and we can probably assume that BMI and SESAC are in the same range). But as soon as you transmit music over the net, it somehow becomes thousands of times more valuable? Shit, what is the industry going to do when digital radio finally rolls out? GNURadio + streamripper = never have to buy a CD again, unless you want slightly better reproduction or you're really interested in the filler surrounding that one popular track. And there's nothing... nothing that the RIAA cartel can do about that.
Re:I'm not sure how accurate this statement is.
on
MRAM in 2004?
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· Score: 1
I would think most of the people who keep their PCs on 24/7 do it for P2P or [Seti|Folding]@home or possibly to prevent wear and tear on the hard drive
Let's not forget the mailserver duties. I coalesce 8 different mail accounts into one mailbox and a buttload of mail folders so I can read it from offsite via ssh (and X forwarding if I have my cygwin lappie with me). It also means I never have to wait for my mail to download, even the few seconds needed by DSL.
Do you like the fact thar your grocery store sells your purchasing habits to other parties if you sign onto their "membership" to get the "member discounts"?
Sign? Hell, I never even filled the damn form out, much less returned it! The card seems to work fine even with no one's data attached to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, if one dialled with 'ATDTR'...
That particular idiom really bothers me. The fact is, I am not at all sorry that I'm not interested in listening to a sales pitch while the Fettucini Robusto curdles on the serving chalice. I am not sorry that I have to rebuff the caller. I am not sorry that the caller will not make his/her shift quota. <peewee>I'm not sorry!</peewee>
The general idiom of expressing questions with the expectation of a negative answer ("You wouldn't by chance have...?") is a close second, and both seem to have descended from colloquial English (the British version) common discourse, which presupposes disappointment of the initiator, that he may be "surprised" by the beneficial outcome. "I'm sorry, but..." "Oh, not at all!"
Don't even get me started on "Thanks, anyway"...
True story: The local fish-wrapper was calling my house twice a week for at least 3 months. The paper's name showed up on CNID, so it was easy to let 'em go to voicemail, but it was annoying. So I tried *69 one time and got "The number that last called you cannot be reached". Next step, I dialed the number shown and sure enough, I got through. I said "I'd really appreciate it if you would stop calling me." The rep took my number and then asked "Would you like this number to be blocked for 3 months, 6 months or a year?" "How about forever?" "A year it is. Thank you for calling."
I forsee a time not far off when the government has been sufficiently commercialized as to require citizen-units to pay attention to advertising (probably dolled up as some sort of "save the economy" jihad). But unless and until that happens, let me finish my dinner in peace, ferchrissake!
Technology is enabling even the Average Joe to distribute his creative content without the necessity of a major distributor contract. It may be true now that "your chances are better with a major label", but that will not always be the case. And anyway, if someone wants to voluntarily accept such indenturement, I believe it is their God-given right to do so. It's a simple marketplace solution. Artists can wager their rights that a major corporation will increase their chances of success. Whether that is a good wager is up to the artist.
Nothing guarantees success.
I was, how shall I say.. pissed off! I contacted the FCC and was told that while they could not prevent me from setting up a dish (provided that my apartment had an apropriate skyview), they had no obligation to allow me access to cable TV. Oh, and cable internet was not a regulated service, so the FCC had no jurisdiction over it.
So I got hold of the Federal Trade Commission, to ask if this weren't some sort of restraint-of-trade. The FTC told me that ROS actions must be pursued by the victim (meaning the cable company, in this case) and anyway, the FCC was responsible for regulating cable.
Sooo.... I called the cable company, who told me that yes, it sucked, and no, the parent company didn't care about losing a mere 0.5% of its customers and anyway, internet was just a sideline.
Google has a business plan, unlike 97% of the dot.bombers, and one way or another, they need to pay for that gigantic farm of servers and spiders. They'll make money from Blogger, count on it. And if that means inserting ads in your blog, then you'll have to decide what control is worth to you.
Seriously, though... why is it that downloading a song does not count as a "performance" for the purposes of mechanical royalties? Why does the music industry, as personified by the RIAA, insist that p2p distribution and webcasting are somehow fundamentally different from radio and TV broadcasting of that same material? As the post above pointed out, ASCAP royalties are actually reasonable (and we can probably assume that BMI and SESAC are in the same range). But as soon as you transmit music over the net, it somehow becomes thousands of times more valuable? Shit, what is the industry going to do when digital radio finally rolls out? GNURadio + streamripper = never have to buy a CD again, unless you want slightly better reproduction or you're really interested in the filler surrounding that one popular track. And there's nothing... nothing that the RIAA cartel can do about that.
I'm so 1337!
Gh0d, I wish I could mod that InternetWeek article +1 Funny!