You should have called your credit card company and cancelled the payment *to paypal* citing the fraud.
Oh, I know. I almost always do. Two things about this auction: 1) I just cleared out my junk and had a $800 balance in my paypal account. 2) I clicked through the "are you sure you don't want to pay by bank account" screen in the wrong way, after selecting my credit card for the remaining $200. (I swear they've reversed the yes/no buttons just to catch people like me.) Next time, I'll cash out and use my credit card instead.
So, it was the perfect storm of eBay scammery. Obviously, that gave me extra incentive to track the guy down. Thank God he was an idiot. When I actually said to him, "Now I know you're lying to me, this email has exactly the same originating IP address as the other one you sent me as [fake ebay name]" He said, "You can't read my IP, I'm behind a firewall!!!" Oops.
Last week, I got an officer in Miami to go to a scammer's house who I tracked down who stole $1000 from me using a (surprise) laptop auction. I've been ebaying for 6 years now, and he had over 35 positive feedback, 100%, recent activity.. none of the signs of obvious phish/fraud. (It was through the recent activity/shill feedback that I tracked him down) I had phone contact, etc..
When the police showed up, he blamed "his nephew" but it was obviously him. Anyway, good news: I got my $$ back so he could avoid jail.
The bad: I knew something was fishy less than 24 hours after payment. I called paypal, and asked them to cancel. They convinced me not to put in a complaint by saying "don't worry, you're covered." A day later, I was more sure of fraud, I called back.. AGAIN they said "Don't worry your covered!" I said "Are you sure? Completely covered?" and they said YES!
Two weeks later, when I file the claim, guess what? Not covered. Only $175 out of my $1000. In no way could $175 of $1000 be called "covered" I had names and numbers for each rep who told me not to stop the transaction. I asked them to look up the recorded phone calls. I spent an hour on the phone with a supervisor who promised me he'd look into in to it and help me, and to call him back at a certain day/time. When I did, he wasn't working. I haven't been able to reach him since.
When this is totally settled, I am going to launch a formal complaint at the FTC. If everyone who is mistreated by ebay/paypal complains to the FTC by writing, faxing, and calling, we can get some action. In the end, I didn't lose money, but I did lose 20-30 hours of tracking this guy down and calling the police, FBI, and even the Secret Service.
I'm lucky, I got my money back. Most aren't.
Ebay/Paypal could do A LOT but they don't, and they make hand over fist as a complicit party to fraud.
Excuse me, but why should I have to pay tax dollars to a state who put a city 17 feet below sea level? This was an inevitability, and why should the FEDERAL government have to suck it up? Sure, you could 'fill in the blank' with all sorts of pork projects, but seriously, more socialism isn't the answer here.
I already made my contributions to New Orleans. I stayed in their hotels, ate their food and patronized their stores. They should have been putting more of the tax revenue into the levee system, apparently.
I like to play devil's advocate quite a lot, and considering the standard "Linux R0x0rz" feeling around here, I was trying to counter it.. I do have a mandrake server at home, and to disagree with the trolls, I do in fact run oO. I'm ignoring the vitriol, however, and answering your post, because it was [mostly] polite and reasoned.
You conclude with I completely disagree that Microsoft has "provided value" to offset any additional costs of "goodness."
however, you contridict yourself previously:
"Giving away things for free is BAD BAD BAD under a monopoly! "
Which is it? Giving things away free, which in your opinion in this case is bad? Or no added value? (logically "things for free") You can't have your argument both ways.
My biggest problem with the browser antitrust issue is that Operating Systems have ALWAYS added utilities that had previously been 3rd party applications in their main package. Hell-- Why didn't Novell sue when MS added networking? Or apple for AppleTalk? Why didn't Norton sue when they added enhanced Chkdsk? Or Defrag capabilities? Why aren't the firewall companies suing because microsoft added a firewall into SP2? Are you saying they should? Are you saying this is bad?
At the end of the day, the browser is nothing but a tiny utility to translate script into graphics-- a document reader. WTF was the giant bruhaha about all of a sudden? I NEVER paid for netscape because I thought it was a giant ripoff at the time. I thing it was remarkably logical to include this in Windows at the time and moreso in retrospect.
Others have rebutted your $500 office figure, and I will add when WordPerfect was dominant, it WAS $500. In the end, office became dominant because they provided a superior product for less money, and better integration. (Man, was WP 6 crap.)
Finally, one previously unspoken point about a of the 'benefit' of the Microsoft Monopoly: Having 90% of the world on one platform has virtually created a single platform for application developers to target. This clearly allows commercial developers to make MUCH more money, saving huge sums in multi-platform development, sales, support, etc.. If anything, this point singlehandedly blows away any BS "loss" by the MS monopoly.
Again, I am not saying Monopoly is bad, and I CERTAINLY say that microsofts practices (strongarming hardware manufacturers is TERRIBLE and should be looked at as anti trust infractions) I'm merely saying that there are, in fact, good things about the microsoft monopoly that offset any lies, damned lies and statitistcs.
With a New PC system with OS-- easily available for under $500, I find this hard to believe. The price of a microsoft windows OEM install hasn't gone up considerably since the mid 90's, when there was a competing operating system (OS/2) available for about the same price.
I just don't feel they've taken the "good" parts of Microsoft's monopoly into account (kill me for saying that.) Considering all of the features included with the OS that we used to pay for-- Browser, media, utils, etc, Microsoft has "given" a lot to maintain their monopoly. While I support competition whole heartedly (and look forward to a day where I can "choose Mac OS to run on my custom intel hardware) I don't think this is an honest assesment. You get a LOT with what you pay for, and there hasn't even been a new version in 4 years. And they still support you with security fixes for FREE (all jokes aside).
Office is no more expensive now than when Word Perfect was still alive and kicking.. And the features keep coming. (Though I gladly use openOffice, myself.)
I think the worry should be "Let's not make this a total monopoly so one company can't hold all the keys to human technology in the future" rather than, man, they're screwing us out of cash.. because I think the sheer volume of units they ship actually causes the price to be CHEAPER, not more expensive.
I guess we'll only find out if Apple sucks it up and makes their OS able to work on Dells.
As a result of Intel's coercion, the HP-AMD desktop offering was dead on arrival. HP ended up taking only 160,000 of the million microprocessors AMD offered
for free.
You should really read this, it's pretty amazing. After AMD offerred HP 1 million processors to compete with Intel Retaliation, Intel upped the stakes, and HP backed down.
I for one am VERY scared about the new Apple Intel adoption. I've always been an AMD fan, but prices of late, as well as difficulting getting "approved" systems for my video editing software has made me purchase Intel for my last 2 machines. (Though I type this on a barton 3000).
I don't think Intel has been driving the innovation bus, and if you thought Microsoft was the bad guys, I have a feeling you aint seen nothin yet.
No, Seriously. King of the Dupes and idiotic stories must go. Call this flamebait, call it trolling, call it offtopic, I don't care, just call him fired. Just because it's the weekend, doesn't mean that crap should be the de facto article on Slashdot. It's better to have fewer articles than this crap.
DRM? DIGITAL rights management? for RELEASE DATES? Come on, it's just a release date-- and because this is more popular than most, they have to go through extra steps just to make sure that no super-retailer has an advantage over another super-retailer. These company have billions on the line for an item that gives them a tiny margin. (It will be cheaper at Walmart than amazon with standard shipping, I'm sure.)
Please, though, seriously, revoke timothy's admin status, or at the very least cut him off from the weed.
The DLO Transpod FM is available today, and it looks a whole lot like the iPod buddy. Sure, theres also has the fancy mounting device, but the rest of it looks like a direct rip of the Transpod-- right down to the LCD display with the FM frequency.
I think this is a situation where the patent system works. The guy has prior art and a patent, what more could you want? The podbuddy people are free to patent a device that attaches an ipod to a cigarette lighter which is used as the anchor-- and they would probably be granted the patent. Then, it's up to them to license the technology if the patent owner allows it, or STFU.
This guy is a whiner, and leave it to Timothy to come up with yet another unresearched, POS article.
The amount you pay for a daily newspaper does not even cover the printing and distribution costs. All money made by the paper (and the majority of production costs) is covered by advertising-- print ads and classifieds. The $.25 or $.50 you pay barely covers the paper and ink.
Web distribution is negligible on daily per-person basis.
The problem here is the failure of online advertising. Somehow during the dotcom boom "per click" payment became the obsession. It seems on the web "branding" or "product awareness" is no longer valuable. There's no perfectly quantifiable way to tell if these sort of ads work in newspapers or television, but if they're not getting the clicks they want, the advertisers say "web advertising doesn't work!!"
I think the obvious answer to this is local data, such as google local. Using your ip address to find your locality and serving up neighborhood ads is the only way for this business model to work-- not just advertising pizza hut, but putting pizza hut's local numbers in the ads you see will help.
But you guys can't have it both ways-- if you block the ads through your browser or your host list, you can't expect free content forever. That's why i don't use anything (other than a popup blocker, of course) to prohibit ads. They are what allow us to consume "free" content.
Remember that next time you block one of these guys. Or go ahead and pay for that content. Slashdot's business model should lead the way!:-)
...Based soley on the fact that the PRINTER DRIVER I'm installing as I type this needs 400 MB of drive space MINIMUM. The full install is 1 GB!!! Adobe can pull off Photoshop CS with only 177 MB, so if that's not inept programming, I don't know what is-- I say, great, cut the beasts head off at the top. Maybe it will grow a better one.
They legitimitely pulled over someone for a violation. Technically, when this happened, you are "arrested." If they were found to have been pulled over falsely, I would hope that the conviction would have been quicly overturned (for having no probable cause at all)
If the case were such that a dog sniffed a guy out in public just walking down the street, and he was detained and arrested for having a joint, then it would apply to random packet sniffing, but this is not quite the case.
I don't like the supreme court's wording (no legitamite reason for carrying contraband) Because, what if the dog incorrectly assessed this? If they opened the trunk, thanks to "probable cause" and it was a false positive-- well, then their rights have been seriously violated. It sounds like the court was operating under the assumption that the dog will be right 100% of the time, and to me, THAT is the biggest flaw in this-- not that it might be stretched dramatically to justify a carnivore-type prosecution..
I installed Norton Internet Security a few weeks back, and by default it kills all connections to shared resources... I've got a linux computer that's basically just a samba drone, and for whatever reason, Norton keeps blocking access.. Eventually, I had to turn all share blocking off to keep it from happening intermittently. There's no user-friendly way of telling it during install or configuration, "hey idiot, I'm connected to several drives/printers for sharing, open up those ports" It doesn't even bother to ask, it just shuts em down.. And did it again after a liveupdate.
On my XP box, I'm paranoid enough about trojans and activex lunacy that I like to monitor in realtime what is asking for net access and block it accordingly, but at the price of these anoyances, I almost uninstalled it.
Hey there flaimbait, just for your info, we are voracious readers-- and that goes for reading to him, as well. You shouldn't dismiss it out of hand, either. Sesame Street, Blues Clues and the like have done wonders for my son. He's 2 1/2, and can out read any 4 or 5 year old at his school. He can easily count up to 20, down from 10, to 100 by 10s and straight to 100 (with a little help) Sure some of it is genetics (His mom & I both read chapter books at 3) But a reasonable amount of that sort of attention grabbing stuff can be really helpful-- Our son is already outpacing where we were at his age-- Plus he's a really sweet, polite and well adjusted kid.
...will be getting some lincoln logs this year. He's already way ahead of the game thanks to educational TV, electronics, and two voracious readers as parents, so we're looking to give him something to inspire good old fasioned fine motor skills and 3d perception..
I never liked those big fat legos-- I'll wait until he can manipulate the "real" ones before I get him into legos...
I worked for an outfit here in Virginia Beach called "Galaxy Computers" about a decade ago. It was a russian couple essentially trying to exploit Americans. While they weren't a total ripoff-- they made an effort to ship things honestly, but FORGET about returns and refunds. There were two competitors locally who both were CS companies, but they were related somehow.. It was strange, kind a like a "russan mafia" thing...
I liked it because I could get stuff at "cost" I remember proudly buying a 166 mhz pentium for "only" $800. Yikes. Aah to be 17 and living with my parents again...
The boss actually took a liking to me when I wrote a defensive (and successful) letter to the BBB when we had a genuinely unrealistic customer. A few weeks later, he asked me to write another letter based upon a complaint, but I refused, because this person had a legitamite complaint. Sasha then informed me "They you quit!" I said, "No, I'm still working here. If you want me to leave, then you fire me." "NO, YOU QUIT!"
Anyway, I think I worked for two more days before he actually fired me, which is the only job from which I've ever been canned..
It's also the only job I've ever had a paycheck refused at a bank.. (and when that happened they paid in cash) But it was fun trying to find people the best deals, and put systems together. I genuinely loved building computers from parts, (still do) and I took pride in talking to people and finding out what they wanted. I'm nostalgic for the big CS book, and that's carried over. I now pride myself on finding the absolute best deals on stuff for friends using froogle/ pricegrabber/ pricwatch/ slickdeals/ techbargains/ half.com/ you name it, but it will never have the nostalgia of pouring over those pages, circling, dogearing, and calculating shipping costs...
"..or a computer used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication) to engage in deceptive acts [etc etc].."
I don't know about you, but my home machine isn't used exclusively by a financial institution or the US government.
This is proper for the US congress. "A computer used in interstate commerce" includes just about everybody-- whenever you buy something off the web from a company in a different state or even use eBay.* The Congress is allowed only to write laws that affect "interstate commerce" which these days is just about everything-- otherwise it is relegated to the state's authority.
"...estimates that up to 90 percent of computers contain some forms of spyware.."
It is good thing that 10% of the market is either running an alternative browser and/or operating system
Just because someone is running IE & XP doesn't mean they have spyware. There are a few out there who are capable of not clicking "install the we-swear-its-not-spyware searchbar" to view their free pr0n.
I'm not saying that I've never inadvertantly picked up some nasty things when using IE, I have done a decent job of making sure it's cleaned out regularly.
IE is very vulnerable, no doubt, but it's not like it includes spyware on the install. (BTW, I'm now running Firefox 90% of the time for speed/tabbing/features reasons, and I keep ie around for the pages that don't quite render right or the media files that don't quite play friendly)
Slashdot Mirror
You should have called your credit card company and cancelled the payment *to paypal* citing the fraud.
Oh, I know. I almost always do. Two things about this auction: 1) I just cleared out my junk and had a $800 balance in my paypal account. 2) I clicked through the "are you sure you don't want to pay by bank account" screen in the wrong way, after selecting my credit card for the remaining $200. (I swear they've reversed the yes/no buttons just to catch people like me.) Next time, I'll cash out and use my credit card instead.
So, it was the perfect storm of eBay scammery. Obviously, that gave me extra incentive to track the guy down. Thank God he was an idiot. When I actually said to him, "Now I know you're lying to me, this email has exactly the same originating IP address as the other one you sent me as [fake ebay name]" He said, "You can't read my IP, I'm behind a firewall!!!" Oops.
Cory
When the police showed up, he blamed "his nephew" but it was obviously him. Anyway, good news: I got my $$ back so he could avoid jail.
The bad:
I knew something was fishy less than 24 hours after payment. I called paypal, and asked them to cancel. They convinced me not to put in a complaint by saying "don't worry, you're covered." A day later, I was more sure of fraud, I called back.. AGAIN they said "Don't worry your covered!" I said "Are you sure? Completely covered?" and they said YES!
Two weeks later, when I file the claim, guess what? Not covered. Only $175 out of my $1000. In no way could $175 of $1000 be called "covered" I had names and numbers for each rep who told me not to stop the transaction. I asked them to look up the recorded phone calls. I spent an hour on the phone with a supervisor who promised me he'd look into in to it and help me, and to call him back at a certain day/time. When I did, he wasn't working. I haven't been able to reach him since.
When this is totally settled, I am going to launch a formal complaint at the FTC. If everyone who is mistreated by ebay/paypal complains to the FTC by writing, faxing, and calling, we can get some action. In the end, I didn't lose money, but I did lose 20-30 hours of tracking this guy down and calling the police, FBI, and even the Secret Service.
I'm lucky, I got my money back. Most aren't.
Ebay/Paypal could do A LOT but they don't, and they make hand over fist as a complicit party to fraud.
It's time to change.
Is this study government funded?
I will only believe in an anti-foil study if I see one sponsored by Reynolds.
Actually, the virus causes reposts on the slashdot homepage. Apparently, he bought himself a Zen recently.
Excuse me, but why should I have to pay tax dollars to a state who put a city 17 feet below sea level? This was an inevitability, and why should the FEDERAL government have to suck it up? Sure, you could 'fill in the blank' with all sorts of pork projects, but seriously, more socialism isn't the answer here.
I already made my contributions to New Orleans. I stayed in their hotels, ate their food and patronized their stores. They should have been putting more of the tax revenue into the levee system, apparently.
I'm deleting the hell out of my cookies.
Of course, I'm on a static IP, and I'm a gmail user, so I suppose it probably doesn't account for much.
I like to play devil's advocate quite a lot, and considering the standard "Linux R0x0rz" feeling around here, I was trying to counter it.. I do have a mandrake server at home, and to disagree with the trolls, I do in fact run oO. I'm ignoring the vitriol, however, and answering your post, because it was [mostly] polite and reasoned.
You conclude with
I completely disagree that Microsoft has "provided value" to offset any additional costs of "goodness."
however, you contridict yourself previously:
"Giving away things for free is BAD BAD BAD under a monopoly! "
Which is it? Giving things away free, which in your opinion in this case is bad? Or no added value? (logically "things for free") You can't have your argument both ways.
My biggest problem with the browser antitrust issue is that Operating Systems have ALWAYS added utilities that had previously been 3rd party applications in their main package. Hell-- Why didn't Novell sue when MS added networking? Or apple for AppleTalk? Why didn't Norton sue when they added enhanced Chkdsk? Or Defrag capabilities? Why aren't the firewall companies suing because microsoft added a firewall into SP2? Are you saying they should? Are you saying this is bad?
At the end of the day, the browser is nothing but a tiny utility to translate script into graphics-- a document reader. WTF was the giant bruhaha about all of a sudden? I NEVER paid for netscape because I thought it was a giant ripoff at the time. I thing it was remarkably logical to include this in Windows at the time and moreso in retrospect.
Others have rebutted your $500 office figure, and I will add when WordPerfect was dominant, it WAS $500. In the end, office became dominant because they provided a superior product for less money, and better integration. (Man, was WP 6 crap.)
Finally, one previously unspoken point about a of the 'benefit' of the Microsoft Monopoly: Having 90% of the world on one platform has virtually created a single platform for application developers to target. This clearly allows commercial developers to make MUCH more money, saving huge sums in multi-platform development, sales, support, etc.. If anything, this point singlehandedly blows away any BS "loss" by the MS monopoly.
Again, I am not saying Monopoly is bad, and I CERTAINLY say that microsofts practices (strongarming hardware manufacturers is TERRIBLE and should be looked at as anti trust infractions)
I'm merely saying that there are, in fact, good things about the microsoft monopoly that offset any lies, damned lies and statitistcs.
Now. Linux R0x0rz.
With a New PC system with OS-- easily available for under $500, I find this hard to believe. The price of a microsoft windows OEM install hasn't gone up considerably since the mid 90's, when there was a competing operating system (OS/2) available for about the same price.
I just don't feel they've taken the "good" parts of Microsoft's monopoly into account (kill me for saying that.) Considering all of the features included with the OS that we used to pay for-- Browser, media, utils, etc, Microsoft has "given" a lot to maintain their monopoly. While I support competition whole heartedly (and look forward to a day where I can "choose Mac OS to run on my custom intel hardware) I don't think this is an honest assesment. You get a LOT with what you pay for, and there hasn't even been a new version in 4 years. And they still support you with security fixes for FREE (all jokes aside).
Office is no more expensive now than when Word Perfect was still alive and kicking.. And the features keep coming. (Though I gladly use openOffice, myself.)
I think the worry should be "Let's not make this a total monopoly so one company can't hold all the keys to human technology in the future" rather than, man, they're screwing us out of cash.. because I think the sheer volume of units they ship actually causes the price to be CHEAPER, not more expensive.
I guess we'll only find out if Apple sucks it up and makes their OS able to work on Dells.
You should really read this, it's pretty amazing. After AMD offerred HP 1 million processors to compete with Intel Retaliation, Intel upped the stakes, and HP backed down.
I for one am VERY scared about the new Apple Intel adoption. I've always been an AMD fan, but prices of late, as well as difficulting getting "approved" systems for my video editing software has made me purchase Intel for my last 2 machines. (Though I type this on a barton 3000).
I don't think Intel has been driving the innovation bus, and if you thought Microsoft was the bad guys, I have a feeling you aint seen nothin yet.
No, Seriously. King of the Dupes and idiotic stories must go. Call this flamebait, call it trolling, call it offtopic, I don't care, just call him fired. Just because it's the weekend, doesn't mean that crap should be the de facto article on Slashdot. It's better to have fewer articles than this crap.
DRM? DIGITAL rights management? for RELEASE DATES? Come on, it's just a release date-- and because this is more popular than most, they have to go through extra steps just to make sure that no super-retailer has an advantage over another super-retailer. These company have billions on the line for an item that gives them a tiny margin. (It will be cheaper at Walmart than amazon with standard shipping, I'm sure.)
Please, though, seriously, revoke timothy's admin status, or at the very least cut him off from the weed.
The DLO Transpod FM is available today, and it looks a whole lot like the iPod buddy. Sure, theres also has the fancy mounting device, but the rest of it looks like a direct rip of the Transpod-- right down to the LCD display with the FM frequency.
I think this is a situation where the patent system works. The guy has prior art and a patent, what more could you want? The podbuddy people are free to patent a device that attaches an ipod to a cigarette lighter which is used as the anchor-- and they would probably be granted the patent. Then, it's up to them to license the technology if the patent owner allows it, or STFU.
This guy is a whiner, and leave it to Timothy to come up with yet another unresearched, POS article.
I hope that guy doesn't get paid.
The amount you pay for a daily newspaper does not even cover the printing and distribution costs. All money made by the paper (and the majority of production costs) is covered by advertising-- print ads and classifieds. The $.25 or $.50 you pay barely covers the paper and ink.
:-)
Web distribution is negligible on daily per-person basis.
The problem here is the failure of online advertising. Somehow during the dotcom boom "per click" payment became the obsession. It seems on the web "branding" or "product awareness" is no longer valuable. There's no perfectly quantifiable way to tell if these sort of ads work in newspapers or television, but if they're not getting the clicks they want, the advertisers say "web advertising doesn't work!!"
I think the obvious answer to this is local data, such as google local. Using your ip address to find your locality and serving up neighborhood ads is the only way for this business model to work-- not just advertising pizza hut, but putting pizza hut's local numbers in the ads you see will help.
But you guys can't have it both ways-- if you block the ads through your browser or your host list, you can't expect free content forever. That's why i don't use anything (other than a popup blocker, of course) to prohibit ads. They are what allow us to consume "free" content.
Remember that next time you block one of these guys. Or go ahead and pay for that content. Slashdot's business model should lead the way!
...Based soley on the fact that the PRINTER DRIVER I'm installing as I type this needs 400 MB of drive space MINIMUM. The full install is 1 GB!!! Adobe can pull off Photoshop CS with only 177 MB, so if that's not inept programming, I don't know what is-- I say, great, cut the beasts head off at the top. Maybe it will grow a better one.
I'd Hit it!!!
Oh, wait. Crap. Wrong website.
They legitimitely pulled over someone for a violation. Technically, when this happened, you are "arrested." If they were found to have been pulled over falsely, I would hope that the conviction would have been quicly overturned (for having no probable cause at all)
If the case were such that a dog sniffed a guy out in public just walking down the street, and he was detained and arrested for having a joint, then it would apply to random packet sniffing, but this is not quite the case.
I don't like the supreme court's wording (no legitamite reason for carrying contraband) Because, what if the dog incorrectly assessed this? If they opened the trunk, thanks to "probable cause" and it was a false positive-- well, then their rights have been seriously violated. It sounds like the court was operating under the assumption that the dog will be right 100% of the time, and to me, THAT is the biggest flaw in this-- not that it might be stretched dramatically to justify a carnivore-type prosecution..
Man, the toronto police dept. seriously needs to hire a farker or two. Even the mediocre photoshoppers there do a better job than they did.
Of course, one of those photos would probably end up with Admiral Ackbar, Wil Wheaton or that over-endowed squirel.
I installed Norton Internet Security a few weeks back, and by default it kills all connections to shared resources... I've got a linux computer that's basically just a samba drone, and for whatever reason, Norton keeps blocking access.. Eventually, I had to turn all share blocking off to keep it from happening intermittently. There's no user-friendly way of telling it during install or configuration, "hey idiot, I'm connected to several drives/printers for sharing, open up those ports" It doesn't even bother to ask, it just shuts em down.. And did it again after a liveupdate.
On my XP box, I'm paranoid enough about trojans and activex lunacy that I like to monitor in realtime what is asking for net access and block it accordingly, but at the price of these anoyances, I almost uninstalled it.
Hey there flaimbait, just for your info, we are voracious readers-- and that goes for reading to him, as well. You shouldn't dismiss it out of hand, either. Sesame Street, Blues Clues and the like have done wonders for my son. He's 2 1/2, and can out read any 4 or 5 year old at his school. He can easily count up to 20, down from 10, to 100 by 10s and straight to 100 (with a little help) Sure some of it is genetics (His mom & I both read chapter books at 3) But a reasonable amount of that sort of attention grabbing stuff can be really helpful-- Our son is already outpacing where we were at his age-- Plus he's a really sweet, polite and well adjusted kid.
...will be getting some lincoln logs this year. He's already way ahead of the game thanks to educational TV, electronics, and two voracious readers as parents, so we're looking to give him something to inspire good old fasioned fine motor skills and 3d perception..
I never liked those big fat legos-- I'll wait until he can manipulate the "real" ones before I get him into legos...
..in two years or so, the internet(s) will commit Hannu-Kari?
That'll make downloading the torrent of the movie feel like I'm getting it via 2400 baud modem!!!
1 gif = 5 minutes.
Sometimes it doesn't seem real that I was so impressed by diffused dithered greyscale images of "real pictures" on my PC.
I was just about finished convincing myself that I needed some Apple hardware so I could run Final Cut Pro. If they make that work, I'm SO sold.
I worked for an outfit here in Virginia Beach called "Galaxy Computers" about a decade ago. It was a russian couple essentially trying to exploit Americans. While they weren't a total ripoff-- they made an effort to ship things honestly, but FORGET about returns and refunds. There were two competitors locally who both were CS companies, but they were related somehow.. It was strange, kind a like a "russan mafia" thing...
I liked it because I could get stuff at "cost" I remember proudly buying a 166 mhz pentium for "only" $800. Yikes. Aah to be 17 and living with my parents again...
The boss actually took a liking to me when I wrote a defensive (and successful) letter to the BBB when we had a genuinely unrealistic customer. A few weeks later, he asked me to write another letter based upon a complaint, but I refused, because this person had a legitamite complaint. Sasha then informed me "They you quit!" I said, "No, I'm still working here. If you want me to leave, then you fire me." "NO, YOU QUIT!"
Anyway, I think I worked for two more days before he actually fired me, which is the only job from which I've ever been canned..
It's also the only job I've ever had a paycheck refused at a bank.. (and when that happened they paid in cash) But it was fun trying to find people the best deals, and put systems together. I genuinely loved building computers from parts, (still do) and I took pride in talking to people and finding out what they wanted. I'm nostalgic for the big CS book, and that's carried over. I now pride myself on finding the absolute best deals on stuff for friends using froogle/ pricegrabber/ pricwatch/ slickdeals/ techbargains/ half.com/ you name it, but it will never have the nostalgia of pouring over those pages, circling, dogearing, and calculating shipping costs...
This is proper for the US congress. "A computer used in interstate commerce" includes just about everybody-- whenever you buy something off the web from a company in a different state or even use eBay.* The Congress is allowed only to write laws that affect "interstate commerce" which these days is just about everything-- otherwise it is relegated to the state's authority.
It is good thing that 10% of the market is either running an alternative browser and/or operating system
Just because someone is running IE & XP doesn't mean they have spyware. There are a few out there who are capable of not clicking "install the we-swear-its-not-spyware searchbar" to view their free pr0n.
I'm not saying that I've never inadvertantly picked up some nasty things when using IE, I have done a decent job of making sure it's cleaned out regularly.
IE is very vulnerable, no doubt, but it's not like it includes spyware on the install. (BTW, I'm now running Firefox 90% of the time for speed/tabbing/features reasons, and I keep ie around for the pages that don't quite render right or the media files that don't quite play friendly)