Problem is, you can't. Unless you require professors to give out a minimum percentage of non-A grades (10% must fail, 25% must score a D or lower, 50% must score a C or lower) there's no hope.
Any non-technical class...and even some technical classes...can't be forced to be "fair." For a technical question, there is a "right" and "wrong" answer. Partial credit is usually given for using the proper method but executing a simple (arithmetic) mistake. Simplistically, a trinary system*. Grade an analysis of poetry? Its nearly all subjective.
No, without setting a "you must fail x%" for your professors, or "average no greater than X.X GPA", you're stuck with the problem.
* Unless you have may Aero prof., who didn't give partial credit because "would you give partial credit for the engineers on Challenger - they made it part way, right?" Don't flame me, I worked at NASA. Though an asinine remark at face value, it emphasized the reality of Engineering. There were some very bright people there, and their life's effort is tied to the project on which they work. Don't ever believe that's its just an exercise.
Hey...this sounds familiar. In fact, it appears to mirror the "trade secret" vs "patent" options to an inventer. Keep it secret (if you can) and it's yours as long as you can monopolize it. Make it public, and we'll grant you a monopoly for a fixed period of time.
This is one of those things that enthusiasts seem to flock to, but will have precious little demand. This may be a great leap forward for everything the RIAA/MPAA hate, but it will make a pretty small difference to Jow Sixpack. I have yet to see a DivX disc for sale at retail.
It seems that the only real (legal) use for this is being able to write out home videos to CD-R rather than DVD-R. Of course, at the rate DVD-R prices are dropping this won't be an issue by next year. While it's wonderful that all the file-sharers don't have to watch their DivX rips on PC, its going to need a little more market penetration before being considered mainstream.
Oh, one last beef...Tom's seems to be touting its use on projectors and the unit shows the "progressive" moniker implying it outputs 480p signals. However, it has no component video outputs.
Huh? Thay don't pay for fax/phone/mail orders from companies without a nexus in the recipient's state.
If I order via internet/fax/phone/mail from Smarthome (in CA, no Nexus in VA - where I live) I don't pay tax. If I order anything via any means from Crutchfield, I pay tax (Nexus in VA).
Internet companies currently have the same interstate-commerce protections as mail-order houses. But the states, after binging on taxes generated by the stock market bubble of the nineties, need sustainable dollars to run their services. As internet commerce gets larger, a N% tax starts looking like real money - real money that State Legislatures are afraid to ask their populations for directly.
If you're in a 50% personal tax bracket, I really can't feel too sorry for you, as that would put you in the top tax bracket for both federal and state. Definitely not working mans wages.
However, as I feel your pain, I would recommend an alternative tax. Instead of income, how about net revenue? No deductions, no alterations. You sell something, you pay tax on the income. You pay a percenteage to your brokerage house for executing the trade, why not to the government for ensuring that the rules governing the safe trading of stocks is conceived, written, dissemenated, and policed?
"How Much?" I hear you ask. Well, GDP for the US is roughly $40 trillion dollars. The federal government spends $2 trillion. That means roughly 5%. Of course that estimate is high. To tax all (gross) income would be a larger number, so we could probably get away with about 2-3%. That's less than some brokerages and mutual funds. Of course, this would require that corporations start pulling their weight and be subject to this as well.
Yes, this means people earning less than $25,000 a year would pay more taxes. For those getting the EIC (a negative tax bracket), it could be as much as $400-600 plus their EIC (in excess of $1000). If every entity with a federal tax number got a $250 credit (i.e. - you make minimum wage or less, you pay no taxes) we could throw 'em a bone, and allow for a small break for those with children. It also means that small businesses with low incomes would realize that break, or could use it in place of a tax deduction for up to $12,500 in equipment each year.
I have tried to d/l a few MP3s from "hit" records which don't show up on radio playlists. I, personally, would like to own fewer discs like "What Up, Dog" from Was, Not Was to find that "Walk the Dinosaur" was the exception to their musical style, not the rule.
My results? I downloaded some 30 min clicks 'n' pops, I downloaded some good rips, I had more than I care to admit just never download.
I can't imagine using the internet P2P to shorten ripping my own 200cd collection (I'm on about #55 after a week of casual background ripping). It takes my machine about 4-6 minutes to rip and encode MP3pro@96kb with maximum processing. If I could fill my DSL downstream pipe (which has never happened on gnutella), it would take 15 minutes to d/l an inferior 128kb MP3 copy of a whole album, not to mention the time it would take to find and catalog my CDs on the P2P networks.
My opinion on poising the well is that we (the P2P "clients") are our won worst enemies. If everybody checked their d/ls and just deleted the crap files, a simple host count would let the cream rise to the top. Bitzi's nice, but requires too much interaction and end-user initiative to work well. Let's face it - we're lazy and they know that...and they're using it against us.
Um...it's nice that they have a ready to go adaprter, but two years ago the lowliest of Gforce cards could be set to HDTV standard outputs with third-party software (YXY, IIRC). That's how I put up a 720p image on my 10HT projector, as it would not allow a pixel-for-pixel (768x1365) map of the display LCD via RGBHV input. Had to send it out as a component.
Not that it helps...HDTV reception (ASTC tuner) is still north of $300, even as a PCI card.
Props to FW, but try finding a screaming deal now. I gotta wait 'til next week to score a 200G @ $1. Sad to say, but the best "hard work" scenereos right now only net about $.80/G after tax, and generally not in the size I want. I agree that any deal greater than $1/gig just hasn't been worth it for the last 2-3 months. Just the same, being able to say "I want this size, I want it now, I don't wanna fool with any stinkin' rebates, coupons or YMMV PMs," and being able to get it _is_ a milestone of sorts.
Nonetheless, my dream of a DVD server for the 200+ discs I have is still a small dot on my financial horizon.:-)
about paying for a Tivo subscription. Perhaps they should change the pricing plan. Instead of the $175 basic unit, you buy a Tivo for $425 and it comes with a $250 mail-in-rebate if you agree to sign up for their $12.95/mo service.
Not mentioned is that DTV is adding a buttload of local channels "by june" including my home region of Roanoke. The only drawback I see is that the networks still won't be in HD on DTV, but my cable company is so backwards that they may never broadcast in HD, preferring - when forced by SD phase-out - to simply down convert to 480i and continue with NTSC signal over cable.
I guess my only fear is the DTV box total hold on the content. If they decide I only get it down-res'd, that's my only viewing option. I suppose what I really want is a modulated RF-out for the HD. That way I can pipe it through my house to my (future) HD-integrated sets, or to my DRM-unfettered PC decoder.
Now that's what I'm talkin' about. 3.2 Gb/s is a worthwhile number. I can see this as a potentially useful tool for memory-based photoshop swap-files, or truly fast portable downloads.
For those who might question that there isn't a soft spot in my heart for Apple, ya'll should know that I cut my digital teeth hand assembling 6502 machine code one summer...just for fun.
And for those who scoffed at my 10E+1 requirement, or used physical comparisons (my folks brand new Audi has a CD player which can't read a CD-R, how can I expect revolutionary results anywhere in the auto industry?) it is typical for a factor or 8 or 10 to go by before most folks upgrade.
Network speeds are nicely partitioned - 10, 100, gigabit. Cds to DVDs are about 8x in storage. Blu-ray, or HD-DVD, or whatever takes over will probably have to see another 6x-10x to be really useful. I'll admit that most processor jumps are in 2x increments, but - I'll be honest - I rarely buy each iteration, preferring to skip two at a time (6502+64kB to 8086+640kB to P75+8MB to K6-350+128MB to P4-2.4+384MB...soon to be a gig... being my upgrades) with minor tweaks along the way. 33.6 to 56k modems? Yawn - I got at 56 'cause my 33.6 broke ant there was no price difference. I bypassed starband and waited for DSL.
There may be very few applications for 3.2Gb transfers right now, but they will come. I paid $110 for my first firewire card, and it was a bargain at that price. It still serves me well for DV transfers. I'll worry about FW2 when I have to stream uncompressed HD @ 1920p around the house.
Of course, it won't matter. Only Apple would put forth a "revolutionary" new product which offers a measly 2x improvement. Note to technologists: please offer an order of magnitude (give or take) before making us by everything over again.
It's not necessarily the moving pictures, but the 50 "music choice" (ha!) channels which are broadcast. Nobody really believes that XM and Sirius will remain commercial free, but DTVs MC channels are a cheap selling point - a way to add 50 more "channels" at a fraction of the bandwidth. There's no real need to change that.
If you already have a DTV subscription, one would hope that your car would be an "additional receiver" at $5 (is that right?) per month. Besides, in two years the price will come down and you'll be able to pick one up for $150, and in ten years you'll be able to have one factory-installed in your new car for $1000. (Those detriot guys are always right on top of all that techno-stuff).
Ah, but some might say that the definition of an engineer, as a profession, is regulated by government. And in the US, that definition includes the passing of a two phase exam separated by 4 years of internship (engineering work of progressively increasing responsibility supervised by a licensed professional engineer). This holds true in many other countries as well -numbers may change, but the idea is the same.
In the eyes of the state (and hence, the courts), if you don't have a "P.E." behind your name, you are not an "Engineer," as you may not advertise your services as an "Engineer." You may be a programmer, a mechanical designer, or a housewife (aka domestic eng*), but you're not allowed to sell your services as an engineer. Your company, or the company you work for, may not have the word engineer in its title without a majority of the partners being an engineer (this is typical of state laws). If you disagree, please send a letter with your company name to the National Society of Professional Engineers and your state engineering board...they'll be happy to set you right.
The problem with engineers is that there's no name protection. Everybody and there brother claims to be an engineer. Sanitation Engineer instead of a trash collector? Domestic Engineer instead of a house[spouse]. Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer? Don't see to may of them with a P.E. on their sig line.
Engineering is fine, but the computer and information industry may be in a down trend.
I've encountered this a couple of times, and agree with you completely. It seems like a disservice to the advertisers NOT to have them listed somewhere on your site. Most trade mags will have an advertisers index in the back for just this purpose. Need to find that 1/4 page ad on the Endless Pool? Look on page 18. Seems so simple, yet nobody on the web does it in an easy, logical way, AFAIK.
Now that I have broadband, I'm not as angry at ads, since they don't make the pages take (noticably) longer to load. The least sites can do is let me find the advertisers I want to get to.
I recently received my first off-color spam email at my "main" address (three years, pr0n spam free). There was a "remove-me" link to a blind web-page, but that seemed beyond foolish. I almost just deleted the email, but realized that I didn't want to leave this unanswered.
I opened the html body, then did a whois search on all six domains in the email. Four were owned by the "sender." One was for the content company, another for a payment processing company. I also looked up Virginia spam laws. There is one, section 18.2-152.4: Computer Trespass. It states
A. It shall be unlawful for any person to use a computer or computer network without authority and with the intent to:
7. Falsify or forge electronic mail transmission information or other routing information in any manner in connection with the transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic mail through or into the computer network of an electronic mail service provider or its subscribers.
The offense is a class 6 misdemeanor. In addition section 152.12 has civil relief and damages of legal fees, court costs, and the greater of actual damages or $10 per email (limited to $25,000/day) payable both the receiver and the email provider.
I replied, as the postmaster of my domain, that the email was unwanted, and I was not to receive any transmissions in the future to any emails in this domain. I sent the email to the admin contact of each domain, and to the return-to addressee with a return receipt. I notified them that, should I not receive a response from the return-addressee, the email would be assumed to include "falsified mail transmission information" and would be in violation of the applicable Virginia statute.
A week later I received an inquiry from the payment processor asking for the email body in order to identify the spammer. A day after sending the body text, I received a nice email from the same company, apologizing for the inconvenience and informing me that the spammers account had been frozen, as he was in violation of his terms of service.
It's a shame he hadn't sent me a couple hundred emails at once, so I could have filed in civil court for a couple of grand. Spending 30 minutes to piss him off is worth my time, but filing in court for $10 isn't.
My small town has a telco co-op. We're not part of the evil rural telcos which prevent the use of satellite services, however (thank goodness).
Nonetheless, the one telco owns both the phone and cable company. As a result, we get DSL only with no hope of ever having a competing cable-internet provider. The area is mountainous andthe population small enough that WiFi is not particularly feasable.
It's $19 for the ISP, and $25 for the dsl line, which I don't find outrageous. A $99 setup fee, fully refundable for 30 days, got me the DSL modem, 2 filters, and all the setup help I needed. I'm just lucky that my co-op is reasonable, but they could be real asses about it. I'm about 16,000' from the switch and peak above 550kb down.
I suppose a wifi in my area might work, though the cell towers near me give marginal, analog-only cell coverage. Driving five minutes gets me to the end of my driveway...and the bottom of a valley...and I probably wouldn't want to do all of my online work from five minutes away from my home anyway.
I remember whe Goldin came in. The joke was that he saw the enemy on the horizon and immediately ordered all the women and children executed so that they couldn't be captured.
As romantic as the shuttle is, it takes a lot of money away from the hard science which gets done at the research centers.
Good luck...keep you chin up.
(disclaimer: I'm a Goddard alum, special payloads division. I'd say hi to Stew and Craig, but I'm not sure they're still there, and I doubt they surf/.)
This is exactly why we need better security on DVDs. I mean when you can just rip it straight from the disc and put it on the net its no wonder......um......oh, I guess copy protection has nothing to do with it.
I got one for my wife for her birthday a year and a half ago. The way we use it is almost never advertised, and can't be done on a VCR or any PC-PVR product I'm aware of:
We follow just a couple of prime time series - The West Wing is our fav. Tivo is set to record only the first-run episodes. I think tonight may be the first time in a year that we've "caught up" with the series and may watch it live.
My wife likes certain history/info topics (ancient Egypt, ghost stories, and the Civil War for examples). TiVo is set to record these as "suggestions." There's always something on she really likes to watch.
It's worth the subscription price to never have to worry about setting the recording schedule. It's just effortless to watch the small % of broadcast TV we like. Nobody else offers that (though with a better central database, a PC-PVR could probably be programmed...by my wife would never do it).
I though about cancelling when the subscription went up to $13, but we just get too much out of it.
Actually, I believe the financial potential of MicrosoftOS and Micorsoft Office Suites (yeah, I'd made 'em up) would outstrip the current Microsoft. Your widows and orphans might actually be better served with a breakup. (I own a good deal of MS through S&P500 tracking funds, and I'd rather see them burn in hell and put off retirement for a couple of years).
If they really wanted to kill half the company, force them to sell Office to Novell.
I don't believe it was stated that the donations made any differece. He was "appointed" by the supreme court, as they interpreted the election results which were in dispute. It is, clearly, a biased point of view, but one which is held by a plurality of the voting electorate.
Though I haven't seen the candidate's financial disclosure, nor the disclosures of those "independent" groups which campaigned on issues for which only GW Bush supported, I would expect that Microsoft and its employees made more than trivial contributions towards the goal of G W Bush ascending to the presidency.
Slashdot Mirror
Problem is, you can't. Unless you require professors to give out a minimum percentage of non-A grades (10% must fail, 25% must score a D or lower, 50% must score a C or lower) there's no hope.
Any non-technical class...and even some technical classes...can't be forced to be "fair." For a technical question, there is a "right" and "wrong" answer. Partial credit is usually given for using the proper method but executing a simple (arithmetic) mistake. Simplistically, a trinary system*. Grade an analysis of poetry? Its nearly all subjective.
No, without setting a "you must fail x%" for your professors, or "average no greater than X.X GPA", you're stuck with the problem.
* Unless you have may Aero prof., who didn't give partial credit because "would you give partial credit for the engineers on Challenger - they made it part way, right?" Don't flame me, I worked at NASA. Though an asinine remark at face value, it emphasized the reality of Engineering. There were some very bright people there, and their life's effort is tied to the project on which they work. Don't ever believe that's its just an exercise.
Hey...this sounds familiar. In fact, it appears to mirror the "trade secret" vs "patent" options to an inventer. Keep it secret (if you can) and it's yours as long as you can monopolize it. Make it public, and we'll grant you a monopoly for a fixed period of time.
I'll vote for it.
This is one of those things that enthusiasts seem to flock to, but will have precious little demand. This may be a great leap forward for everything the RIAA/MPAA hate, but it will make a pretty small difference to Jow Sixpack. I have yet to see a DivX disc for sale at retail.
It seems that the only real (legal) use for this is being able to write out home videos to CD-R rather than DVD-R. Of course, at the rate DVD-R prices are dropping this won't be an issue by next year. While it's wonderful that all the file-sharers don't have to watch their DivX rips on PC, its going to need a little more market penetration before being considered mainstream.
Oh, one last beef...Tom's seems to be touting its use on projectors and the unit shows the "progressive" moniker implying it outputs 480p signals. However, it has no component video outputs.
Huh? Thay don't pay for fax/phone/mail orders from companies without a nexus in the recipient's state.
If I order via internet/fax/phone/mail from Smarthome (in CA, no Nexus in VA - where I live) I don't pay tax. If I order anything via any means from Crutchfield, I pay tax (Nexus in VA).
Internet companies currently have the same interstate-commerce protections as mail-order houses. But the states, after binging on taxes generated by the stock market bubble of the nineties, need sustainable dollars to run their services. As internet commerce gets larger, a N% tax starts looking like real money - real money that State Legislatures are afraid to ask their populations for directly.
Sometimes children don't fully understand...they can be raised to value the proper things.
However, I just read that Kangaroo Jack was the largest grossing movie last weekend at $17M. To quote your comment, "The planet is doomed."
If you're in a 50% personal tax bracket, I really can't feel too sorry for you, as that would put you in the top tax bracket for both federal and state. Definitely not working mans wages.
However, as I feel your pain, I would recommend an alternative tax. Instead of income, how about net revenue? No deductions, no alterations. You sell something, you pay tax on the income. You pay a percenteage to your brokerage house for executing the trade, why not to the government for ensuring that the rules governing the safe trading of stocks is conceived, written, dissemenated, and policed?
"How Much?" I hear you ask. Well, GDP for the US is roughly $40 trillion dollars. The federal government spends $2 trillion. That means roughly 5%. Of course that estimate is high. To tax all (gross) income would be a larger number, so we could probably get away with about 2-3%. That's less than some brokerages and mutual funds. Of course, this would require that corporations start pulling their weight and be subject to this as well.
Yes, this means people earning less than $25,000 a year would pay more taxes. For those getting the EIC (a negative tax bracket), it could be as much as $400-600 plus their EIC (in excess of $1000). If every entity with a federal tax number got a $250 credit (i.e. - you make minimum wage or less, you pay no taxes) we could throw 'em a bone, and allow for a small break for those with children. It also means that small businesses with low incomes would realize that break, or could use it in place of a tax deduction for up to $12,500 in equipment each year.
I have tried to d/l a few MP3s from "hit" records which don't show up on radio playlists. I, personally, would like to own fewer discs like "What Up, Dog" from Was, Not Was to find that "Walk the Dinosaur" was the exception to their musical style, not the rule.
My results? I downloaded some 30 min clicks 'n' pops, I downloaded some good rips, I had more than I care to admit just never download.
I can't imagine using the internet P2P to shorten ripping my own 200cd collection (I'm on about #55 after a week of casual background ripping). It takes my machine about 4-6 minutes to rip and encode MP3pro@96kb with maximum processing. If I could fill my DSL downstream pipe (which has never happened on gnutella), it would take 15 minutes to d/l an inferior 128kb MP3 copy of a whole album, not to mention the time it would take to find and catalog my CDs on the P2P networks.
My opinion on poising the well is that we (the P2P "clients") are our won worst enemies. If everybody checked their d/ls and just deleted the crap files, a simple host count would let the cream rise to the top. Bitzi's nice, but requires too much interaction and end-user initiative to work well. Let's face it - we're lazy and they know that...and they're using it against us.
Um...it's nice that they have a ready to go adaprter, but two years ago the lowliest of Gforce cards could be set to HDTV standard outputs with third-party software (YXY, IIRC). That's how I put up a 720p image on my 10HT projector, as it would not allow a pixel-for-pixel (768x1365) map of the display LCD via RGBHV input. Had to send it out as a component.
Not that it helps...HDTV reception (ASTC tuner) is still north of $300, even as a PCI card.
Props to FW, but try finding a screaming deal now. I gotta wait 'til next week to score a 200G @ $1. Sad to say, but the best "hard work" scenereos right now only net about $.80/G after tax, and generally not in the size I want. I agree that any deal greater than $1/gig just hasn't been worth it for the last 2-3 months. Just the same, being able to say "I want this size, I want it now, I don't wanna fool with any stinkin' rebates, coupons or YMMV PMs," and being able to get it _is_ a milestone of sorts.
:-)
Nonetheless, my dream of a DVD server for the 200+ discs I have is still a small dot on my financial horizon.
about paying for a Tivo subscription. Perhaps they should change the pricing plan. Instead of the $175 basic unit, you buy a Tivo for $425 and it comes with a $250 mail-in-rebate if you agree to sign up for their $12.95/mo service.
Not mentioned is that DTV is adding a buttload of local channels "by june" including my home region of Roanoke. The only drawback I see is that the networks still won't be in HD on DTV, but my cable company is so backwards that they may never broadcast in HD, preferring - when forced by SD phase-out - to simply down convert to 480i and continue with NTSC signal over cable.
I guess my only fear is the DTV box total hold on the content. If they decide I only get it down-res'd, that's my only viewing option. I suppose what I really want is a modulated RF-out for the HD. That way I can pipe it through my house to my (future) HD-integrated sets, or to my DRM-unfettered PC decoder.
Now that's what I'm talkin' about. 3.2 Gb/s is a worthwhile number. I can see this as a potentially useful tool for memory-based photoshop swap-files, or truly fast portable downloads.
For those who might question that there isn't a soft spot in my heart for Apple, ya'll should know that I cut my digital teeth hand assembling 6502 machine code one summer...just for fun.
And for those who scoffed at my 10E+1 requirement, or used physical comparisons (my folks brand new Audi has a CD player which can't read a CD-R, how can I expect revolutionary results anywhere in the auto industry?) it is typical for a factor or 8 or 10 to go by before most folks upgrade.
Network speeds are nicely partitioned - 10, 100, gigabit. Cds to DVDs are about 8x in storage. Blu-ray, or HD-DVD, or whatever takes over will probably have to see another 6x-10x to be really useful. I'll admit that most processor jumps are in 2x increments, but - I'll be honest - I rarely buy each iteration, preferring to skip two at a time (6502+64kB to 8086+640kB to P75+8MB to K6-350+128MB to P4-2.4+384MB...soon to be a gig... being my upgrades) with minor tweaks along the way. 33.6 to 56k modems? Yawn - I got at 56 'cause my 33.6 broke ant there was no price difference. I bypassed starband and waited for DSL.
There may be very few applications for 3.2Gb transfers right now, but they will come. I paid $110 for my first firewire card, and it was a bargain at that price. It still serves me well for DV transfers. I'll worry about FW2 when I have to stream uncompressed HD @ 1920p around the house.
Of course, it won't matter. Only Apple would put forth a "revolutionary" new product which offers a measly 2x improvement. Note to technologists: please offer an order of magnitude (give or take) before making us by everything over again.
It's not necessarily the moving pictures, but the 50 "music choice" (ha!) channels which are broadcast. Nobody really believes that XM and Sirius will remain commercial free, but DTVs MC channels are a cheap selling point - a way to add 50 more "channels" at a fraction of the bandwidth. There's no real need to change that.
If you already have a DTV subscription, one would hope that your car would be an "additional receiver" at $5 (is that right?) per month. Besides, in two years the price will come down and you'll be able to pick one up for $150, and in ten years you'll be able to have one factory-installed in your new car for $1000. (Those detriot guys are always right on top of all that techno-stuff).
But in all the ads, the car is parked. There's no danger here. (did I really need to add a tag?)
Ah, but some might say that the definition of an engineer, as a profession, is regulated by government. And in the US, that definition includes the passing of a two phase exam separated by 4 years of internship (engineering work of progressively increasing responsibility supervised by a licensed professional engineer). This holds true in many other countries as well -numbers may change, but the idea is the same.
In the eyes of the state (and hence, the courts), if you don't have a "P.E." behind your name, you are not an "Engineer," as you may not advertise your services as an "Engineer." You may be a programmer, a mechanical designer, or a housewife (aka domestic eng*), but you're not allowed to sell your services as an engineer. Your company, or the company you work for, may not have the word engineer in its title without a majority of the partners being an engineer (this is typical of state laws). If you disagree, please send a letter with your company name to the National Society of Professional Engineers and your state engineering board...they'll be happy to set you right.
The problem with engineers is that there's no name protection. Everybody and there brother claims to be an engineer. Sanitation Engineer instead of a trash collector? Domestic Engineer instead of a house[spouse]. Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer? Don't see to may of them with a P.E. on their sig line.
Engineering is fine, but the computer and information industry may be in a down trend.
Overzeetop, P.E. (since 1995)
I've encountered this a couple of times, and agree with you completely. It seems like a disservice to the advertisers NOT to have them listed somewhere on your site. Most trade mags will have an advertisers index in the back for just this purpose. Need to find that 1/4 page ad on the Endless Pool? Look on page 18. Seems so simple, yet nobody on the web does it in an easy, logical way, AFAIK.
Now that I have broadband, I'm not as angry at ads, since they don't make the pages take (noticably) longer to load. The least sites can do is let me find the advertisers I want to get to.
I recently received my first off-color spam email at my "main" address (three years, pr0n spam free). There was a "remove-me" link to a blind web-page, but that seemed beyond foolish. I almost just deleted the email, but realized that I didn't want to leave this unanswered.
I opened the html body, then did a whois search on all six domains in the email. Four were owned by the "sender." One was for the content company, another for a payment processing company. I also looked up Virginia spam laws. There is one, section 18.2-152.4: Computer Trespass. It states
A. It shall be unlawful for any person to use a computer or computer network without authority and with the intent to:
7. Falsify or forge electronic mail transmission information or other routing information in any manner in connection with the transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic mail through or into the computer network of an electronic mail service provider or its subscribers.
The offense is a class 6 misdemeanor. In addition section 152.12 has civil relief and damages of legal fees, court costs, and the greater of actual damages or $10 per email (limited to $25,000/day) payable both the receiver and the email provider.
I replied, as the postmaster of my domain, that the email was unwanted, and I was not to receive any transmissions in the future to any emails in this domain. I sent the email to the admin contact of each domain, and to the return-to addressee with a return receipt. I notified them that, should I not receive a response from the return-addressee, the email would be assumed to include "falsified mail transmission information" and would be in violation of the applicable Virginia statute.
A week later I received an inquiry from the payment processor asking for the email body in order to identify the spammer. A day after sending the body text, I received a nice email from the same company, apologizing for the inconvenience and informing me that the spammers account had been frozen, as he was in violation of his terms of service.
It's a shame he hadn't sent me a couple hundred emails at once, so I could have filed in civil court for a couple of grand. Spending 30 minutes to piss him off is worth my time, but filing in court for $10 isn't.
My small town has a telco co-op. We're not part of the evil rural telcos which prevent the use of satellite services, however (thank goodness).
Nonetheless, the one telco owns both the phone and cable company. As a result, we get DSL only with no hope of ever having a competing cable-internet provider. The area is mountainous andthe population small enough that WiFi is not particularly feasable.
It's $19 for the ISP, and $25 for the dsl line, which I don't find outrageous. A $99 setup fee, fully refundable for 30 days, got me the DSL modem, 2 filters, and all the setup help I needed. I'm just lucky that my co-op is reasonable, but they could be real asses about it. I'm about 16,000' from the switch and peak above 550kb down.
I suppose a wifi in my area might work, though the cell towers near me give marginal, analog-only cell coverage. Driving five minutes gets me to the end of my driveway...and the bottom of a valley...and I probably wouldn't want to do all of my online work from five minutes away from my home anyway.
Hmmmm...how much you want to bet that it supports HDTV by being able to record a 480i down-converted signal in NTSC format for playback on your set?
You must actually do research.
/.)
I remember whe Goldin came in. The joke was that he saw the enemy on the horizon and immediately ordered all the women and children executed so that they couldn't be captured.
As romantic as the shuttle is, it takes a lot of money away from the hard science which gets done at the research centers.
Good luck...keep you chin up.
(disclaimer: I'm a Goddard alum, special payloads division. I'd say hi to Stew and Craig, but I'm not sure they're still there, and I doubt they surf
I can hear the back room conversation now:
...um... ...oh, I guess copy protection has nothing to do with it.
This is exactly why we need better security on DVDs. I mean when you can just rip it straight from the disc and put it on the net its no wonder...
Damn, somebody's gotta fry for this!
I got one for my wife for her birthday a year and a half ago. The way we use it is almost never advertised, and can't be done on a VCR or any PC-PVR product I'm aware of:
We follow just a couple of prime time series - The West Wing is our fav. Tivo is set to record only the first-run episodes. I think tonight may be the first time in a year that we've "caught up" with the series and may watch it live.
My wife likes certain history/info topics (ancient Egypt, ghost stories, and the Civil War for examples). TiVo is set to record these as "suggestions." There's always something on she really likes to watch.
It's worth the subscription price to never have to worry about setting the recording schedule. It's just effortless to watch the small % of broadcast TV we like. Nobody else offers that (though with a better central database, a PC-PVR could probably be programmed...by my wife would never do it).
I though about cancelling when the subscription went up to $13, but we just get too much out of it.
I learn new things everyday. I just assumed that since I will perpetually be a student of life, I would always qualify.
Actually, I believe the financial potential of MicrosoftOS and Micorsoft Office Suites (yeah, I'd made 'em up) would outstrip the current Microsoft. Your widows and orphans might actually be better served with a breakup. (I own a good deal of MS through S&P500 tracking funds, and I'd rather see them burn in hell and put off retirement for a couple of years).
If they really wanted to kill half the company, force them to sell Office to Novell.
(Obsure WP reference, in case you didn't get it)
I don't believe it was stated that the donations made any differece. He was "appointed" by the supreme court, as they interpreted the election results which were in dispute. It is, clearly, a biased point of view, but one which is held by a plurality of the voting electorate.
Though I haven't seen the candidate's financial disclosure, nor the disclosures of those "independent" groups which campaigned on issues for which only GW Bush supported, I would expect that Microsoft and its employees made more than trivial contributions towards the goal of G W Bush ascending to the presidency.
I don't see where a retraction is necessary.