More than $2M in idiots, probably. THe $2M is the figure that advertisers pay to get in on OptInRealBigs distribution. One would imagine that the advertisers net far more than that.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's several more levels and the spam that OptInRealBig distributes involves over $100M at the consumer (idiot) level.
Does anyone want to comment on a possible relationship between the flipping of earth's magnetic poles and this kind of activity on the sun?
After all, rumor has it that we're about 500,000 years overdue for a pole-flip, no? And this activity is probably operating on a different cycle than our 11-year solar model. Could there be a connection?
As compared to? Have you looked into getting placed on a shelf instead? I guess you'll make a lesser percentage than if you took direct orders on your website - but people don't go to your website like they do CompUSA.
Because, after all, when everybody agrees to divide the check, most of the people at the table order lobster
Dude. What kind of people do you hang out with? How it usually works is that when everyone agrees to split the bill, most people orders frugally and similarly to everyone else because they don't want to look like assholes.
I don't know why no one else (who comments) sees how this works.
The idea behind this is that MS can have some development house make/market an arcade game that is designed from square one to work on an XBox.
Everybody gets hooked on the arcade game, then when the XBox/Console version is released and people go home and buy it - including buying an Xbox if they haven't already. It's pretty much the same as exlcusive titles, but people get to "Try Before They Buy" at the arcade.
It isn't that the damage being measured in monetary terms and not human terms out of a love of money. It's because money exists as an independent measure of various "goods", whatever they are.
We need some measure to distribute investments of our limited resources in environmentalism, disease control, future growth, or whatever else. That's where money comes in. It says that "OK. Now this is worth enough in quantifiable terms to warrant resource investment over other things."
If environmentalism was free or we had unlimited resources, I'm sure everybody would do it in a heartbeat. Since it isn't we all have to decide whether and how much we need to contribute to it at any time.
Your argument about it this being "about money", and therefore being wrong, is meaningless. Of course it's about money.
Ok. Everybody (here) seems to think that this method is silly because "the P2P networks use MD5, don't they?"
Maybe so. But it doesn't really matter if they do. The reason you are downloading a file is because you don't have it. You supply some search terms (artist/album/song name) and the P2P networks search returns a list of matching files. Now, if one of these files is ridiculously small or large, you can guess that it's bad. Presumably, with good P2P software, the software could probably even check to make sure the file is a recognized music file by looking at the file format... None of those apply to Overpeer's method.
Further, checksums are pretty much worthless once Overpeer's files get sufficiently distributed. Let's say that *you* want to think you are smart and only download a file that you see 5 or 10 other people have. Sure, the P2P software can make sure they all have the same file by matching an checksum. However, it only takes 5 or 10 stupid users having downloaded the dupe file and not deleted (who would really bother?) before you get duped, too.
There's really no way to programmitically know which are the real files and which are Overpeer's dupes - provided Overpeer's doing it right and there are a sufficient number of careless people downloading through P2P.
Maybe my screen's the one with problems, because all I see on your jpg are the arrows that you drew on it.
-Andrew
P.S. Be aware that photographing a CRT isn't too accurate unless you can manually adjust your exposure... Otherwise, you'll get the scanning emitter making it look weird - like yours.
Get a TiVo (you know you want one anyway), start watching the game, pause for six seconds to fill its buffer, then resume watching, happily in sync with the radio.
Well, that's a very good suggestion, if by "happily in sync" you mean "off by twelve seconds".
that $80,000 a year job at 40 hours a week is $40 bucks an hour. That sounds pretty good, right? Work _80_ hours a week and you're only making _$20_ an hour. You're getting robbed if you're really worth $40 per.
I'm always surprised at how much techies let themselves be screwed like this. Just because you are salaried DOES NOT mean that you are exempt from overtime. Being exempt from ovetime pretty much requires that you are in a managerial role supervising at least three other people. Therefore, if you earn an $80,000 a year salary and work 80 hours a week instead of 40, you earn something more like $200,000 per year. If you hunt around on labor law sites for your states rules on overtime exemption and present them to your boss, he might just change his mind about the whole 15 hours a day thing.
I know I'm going to get flamed to death here, but... The reason the government doesn't usually act too harshly on megacorps when they behave badly is twofold:
1. (everybody knows this one) The corporations make big, direct contributions to the government through donations, political contributions, and favorable contracts.
2. (people don't always notice this) Sometimes, the government may feel that it is in the interest of the (short/medium-term) public good to turn a blind eye on violations. Why? Because alot of the megacorps have effectively become infrasturcture providers. If the government went after MS with full force, and ran the thing into the ground, the business sector of the whole damn country would be floundering and faltering for a good couple years, at least. That's not a good thing, at least not for those couple years, and certainly not when you need to stay stable enough to position yourself as the "leader of the free world".
Granted, long-term, the collapse of some of these megacorps could be beneficial for the industry they control as well as the economy as a whole - but only through the result of some pretty severe short-term chaos.
-Andrew
Rental-priced videos
on
Borrowing ROMs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Blockbuster pays on the order of 10 times as much for a copy of a video that they can rent as compared to the copy that you can pick up at Target. Not having worked at a rental store or anything, I can't speak definatively, but aren't there special restrictions on rentals that extend beyond fair use? And may not this apply? If not in the case of console roms, at least, perhaps in the case of "other media", as mentioned?
-Andrew
Re:Why a social robot?
on
Social Robot?
·
· Score: 2
So it's a neat exercise. Is this really what we want robots to do? Recognizing human emotional states and predicting their responses from facial expressions and actions is one of the things humans do best. Why work at making a robot do it? It would seem to make more sense to design robots to do things that humans are BAD at, rather than having them try to do things we're GOOD at.
Because people don't communicate to each other with a keyboard or mouse. If we want robots/computers/silicon-whatever to be able to perform tasks of any sort for non-experts, we need to be able to communicate with them more naturaly, and that means includes gestures and expressions.
As far as I know, people haven't already done this. Interoperability, in the sense that's implied, is a lot more than 'make a new client for the existing protocol', which is what all hacked clients are, essentially. They use TOC or Oscar or whatever else is the fad now to talk to the AIM servers on AOL's terms. The idea of interoperability here is to open up the server's so that registered users of, say, MSN Messenger, can send a message to an AIM user, while only having registered as one user account. Routing a message from MSN-client to MSN-server to AOL-server to AIM-client is a nontrivial task.
More Hollywood movies about africanized honey bee attacks? Please, name some... Asteroids, natural disasters, dinosaurs, maybe... but not bees. There just ain't that many B-movies out there.
I vaguely remember something like this happening with Hotmail about 2 years ago. Somebody even figured out how to generate the URL's given a username, so you could go and read anybody's hotmail if you wanted to. The hole was probably a little different than this, but it's along the same lines.
Nope. Although the RIAA can be dicks about the whole Fair Use thing, the whole idea that a record company doesn't provide value to music is crap. If every artist had their own recording studio with even a (paltry) $100,000 of equipment, their own professional engineers, and their own media outlets for spreading the word, then they wouldn't need record companies. In fact, there are some artists who do that, and it's quite respectable. However, for most artists, without a record company they would not be able to engineer, produce and distribute a good mix successfully were it not for the record company placing a wager on their success.
If you've ever listened to a local bands CD-R burnt CD recorded from a casette they taped at live show, and then a studio-produced album, you'll notice a significant difference in fidelity. Something most (not all) artists want their music to possess.
The RIAA is not some pointless middleman - they're vital - it's just that they're being real assholes about what happens to their (and the artists) work after it hits the shelves.
He was charged after an RCMP investigation found he was selling a line of 413 pirated video games and charging $30 to install "mod chips" in Sony PlayStation video game consoles.
It sucks about him getting busted for the mod chips, but if you're selling pirated games, you've got no excuse for a little punishment. When you start profitting off of your ability to make exact replicas of other peoples work, with little work of your own, you're really profitting off of their work, not yours - and that's not fair.
Can I download compilers that target.NET (ie, the CLR) from Microsoft for free (gratis) like I can the Java SDK from Sun?
Yes, so get off your ignorany little pony and open your eyes. Conecpts behind open source and free software are permeating *every* company these days, so although they may not release Windows under the ownership-stripping GPL, even Microsoft recognizes that to be competitive in some markets (web browsers like IE, Graphic API's like DirectX, and ystem-neutral platforms like.NET), even they need to give stuff away for free.
You are free to download the ".NET SDK", link it into an XEmacs mode and develop all you want for the CLR. If you happen to want a full-fledged high-quality IDE and an amazing documentation browser along with it, you'll need to dish out a few dollars for Visual Studio.NET, but the compiler and libraries are in fact, free.
This article is talking about a different kind of spam - That more innocuous kind where someone asks if for an altruistic act on your part. The idea is that if you ask alot of people for help, and they all know you are asking alot of people, a higher percentage will shrug it off in the expectation that you'll get the help somewhere else.
On the other hand, "Do this for yourself!" spam would seem to fall into a whole different category. It's no longer a matter of letting the responsibility for following through fall on someone else, because the act is completely selfish. If you don't do it, *you* don't recieve the "benefits". The study doesn't really address this kind of spam at all.
I believe there are similar registries for other states. Every quarter, the registry is published and all non-exempt telemarketers must *not* call you if you appear in the registry under penalty of law. Getting in the registry is free and can be done from the above website, if you are a NY resident. Other posters can probably give URL's or addresses for other state registries.
Slashdot Mirror
More than $2M in idiots, probably. THe $2M is the figure that advertisers pay to get in on OptInRealBigs distribution. One would imagine that the advertisers net far more than that.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's several more levels and the spam that OptInRealBig distributes involves over $100M at the consumer (idiot) level.
I meant to ask whether this activity might be a precursor to a flip in our magnetic field.
Does anyone want to comment on a possible relationship between the flipping of earth's magnetic poles and this kind of activity on the sun?
After all, rumor has it that we're about 500,000 years overdue for a pole-flip, no? And this activity is probably operating on a different cycle than our 11-year solar model. Could there be a connection?
As compared to? Have you looked into getting placed on a shelf instead? I guess you'll make a lesser percentage than if you took direct orders on your website - but people don't go to your website like they do CompUSA.
-Andrew
Because, after all, when everybody agrees to divide the check, most of the people at the table order lobster
Dude. What kind of people do you hang out with? How it usually works is that when everyone agrees to split the bill, most people orders frugally and similarly to everyone else because they don't want to look like assholes.
-Andrew
I don't know why no one else (who comments) sees how this works.
The idea behind this is that MS can have some development house make/market an arcade game that is designed from square one to work on an XBox.
Everybody gets hooked on the arcade game, then when the XBox/Console version is released and people go home and buy it - including buying an Xbox if they haven't already. It's pretty much the same as exlcusive titles, but people get to "Try Before They Buy" at the arcade.
-Andrew
It isn't that the damage being measured in monetary terms and not human terms out of a love of money. It's because money exists as an independent measure of various "goods", whatever they are.
We need some measure to distribute investments of our limited resources in environmentalism, disease control, future growth, or whatever else. That's where money comes in. It says that "OK. Now this is worth enough in quantifiable terms to warrant resource investment over other things."
If environmentalism was free or we had unlimited resources, I'm sure everybody would do it in a heartbeat. Since it isn't we all have to decide whether and how much we need to contribute to it at any time.
Your argument about it this being "about money", and therefore being wrong, is meaningless. Of course it's about money.
-Andrew
Ok. Everybody (here) seems to think that this method is silly because "the P2P networks use MD5, don't they?"
Maybe so. But it doesn't really matter if they do. The reason you are downloading a file is because you don't have it. You supply some search terms (artist/album/song name) and the P2P networks search returns a list of matching files. Now, if one of these files is ridiculously small or large, you can guess that it's bad. Presumably, with good P2P software, the software could probably even check to make sure the file is a recognized music file by looking at the file format... None of those apply to Overpeer's method.
Further, checksums are pretty much worthless once Overpeer's files get sufficiently distributed. Let's say that *you* want to think you are smart and only download a file that you see 5 or 10 other people have. Sure, the P2P software can make sure they all have the same file by matching an checksum. However, it only takes 5 or 10 stupid users having downloaded the dupe file and not deleted (who would really bother?) before you get duped, too.
There's really no way to programmitically know which are the real files and which are Overpeer's dupes - provided Overpeer's doing it right and there are a sufficient number of careless people downloading through P2P.
Sorry, but they seem to have something here.
-Andrew
Maybe my screen's the one with problems, because all I see on your jpg are the arrows that you drew on it.
-Andrew
P.S. Be aware that photographing a CRT isn't too accurate unless you can manually adjust your exposure... Otherwise, you'll get the scanning emitter making it look weird - like yours.
Get a TiVo (you know you want one anyway), start watching the game, pause for six seconds to fill its buffer, then resume watching, happily in sync with the radio.
Well, that's a very good suggestion, if by "happily in sync" you mean "off by twelve seconds".
Bart ended up getting the elephant but decided to give it up in the end, returning the family to the status quo for next week.
that $80,000 a year job at 40 hours a week is $40 bucks an hour. That sounds pretty good, right?
Work _80_ hours a week and you're only making _$20_ an hour. You're getting robbed if you're really worth $40 per.
I'm always surprised at how much techies let themselves be screwed like this. Just because you are salaried DOES NOT mean that you are exempt from overtime. Being exempt from ovetime pretty much requires that you are in a managerial role supervising at least three other people. Therefore, if you earn an $80,000 a year salary and work 80 hours a week instead of 40, you earn something more like $200,000 per year. If you hunt around on labor law sites for your states rules on overtime exemption and present them to your boss, he might just change his mind about the whole 15 hours a day thing.
-Andrew
Or maybe nobody wins. Maybe three uncompatible ways to do things will hurt developers.
You mean like:
Mac vs Windows vs Linux?
Or maybe:
Gnome vs KDE vs Motif?
Or how about:
rpm vs apt-get vs pkg?
I know I'm going to get flamed to death here, but... The reason the government doesn't usually act too harshly on megacorps when they behave badly is twofold:
1. (everybody knows this one) The corporations make big, direct contributions to the government through donations, political contributions, and favorable contracts.
2. (people don't always notice this) Sometimes, the government may feel that it is in the interest of the (short/medium-term) public good to turn a blind eye on violations. Why? Because alot of the megacorps have effectively become infrasturcture providers. If the government went after MS with full force, and ran the thing into the ground, the business sector of the whole damn country would be floundering and faltering for a good couple years, at least. That's not a good thing, at least not for those couple years, and certainly not when you need to stay stable enough to position yourself as the "leader of the free world".
Granted, long-term, the collapse of some of these megacorps could be beneficial for the industry they control as well as the economy as a whole - but only through the result of some pretty severe short-term chaos.
-Andrew
Blockbuster pays on the order of 10 times as much for a copy of a video that they can rent as compared to the copy that you can pick up at Target. Not having worked at a rental store or anything, I can't speak definatively, but aren't there special restrictions on rentals that extend beyond fair use? And may not this apply? If not in the case of console roms, at least, perhaps in the case of "other media", as mentioned?
-Andrew
So it's a neat exercise. Is this really what we want robots to do? Recognizing human emotional states and predicting their responses from facial expressions and actions is one of the things humans do best. Why work at making a robot do it? It would seem to make more sense to design robots to do things that humans are BAD at, rather than having them try to do things we're GOOD at.
Because people don't communicate to each other with a keyboard or mouse. If we want robots/computers/silicon-whatever to be able to perform tasks of any sort for non-experts, we need to be able to communicate with them more naturaly, and that means includes gestures and expressions.
-Andrew
As far as I know, people haven't already done this. Interoperability, in the sense that's implied, is a lot more than 'make a new client for the existing protocol', which is what all hacked clients are, essentially. They use TOC or Oscar or whatever else is the fad now to talk to the AIM servers on AOL's terms. The idea of interoperability here is to open up the server's so that registered users of, say, MSN Messenger, can send a message to an AIM user, while only having registered as one user account. Routing a message from MSN-client to MSN-server to AOL-server to AIM-client is a nontrivial task.
-Andrew
More Hollywood movies about africanized honey bee attacks? Please, name some... Asteroids, natural disasters, dinosaurs, maybe... but not bees. There just ain't that many B-movies out there.
Heh.
-Andrew
I vaguely remember something like this happening with Hotmail about 2 years ago. Somebody even figured out how to generate the URL's given a username, so you could go and read anybody's hotmail if you wanted to. The hole was probably a little different than this, but it's along the same lines.
-Andrew
You mean like the RIAA do?
Nope. Although the RIAA can be dicks about the whole Fair Use thing, the whole idea that a record company doesn't provide value to music is crap. If every artist had their own recording studio with even a (paltry) $100,000 of equipment, their own professional engineers, and their own media outlets for spreading the word, then they wouldn't need record companies. In fact, there are some artists who do that, and it's quite respectable. However, for most artists, without a record company they would not be able to engineer, produce and distribute a good mix successfully were it not for the record company placing a wager on their success.
If you've ever listened to a local bands CD-R burnt CD recorded from a casette they taped at live show, and then a studio-produced album, you'll notice a significant difference in fidelity. Something most (not all) artists want their music to possess.
The RIAA is not some pointless middleman - they're vital - it's just that they're being real assholes about what happens to their (and the artists) work after it hits the shelves.
-Andrew
He was charged after an RCMP investigation found he was selling a line of 413 pirated video games and charging $30 to install "mod chips" in Sony PlayStation video game consoles.
It sucks about him getting busted for the mod chips, but if you're selling pirated games, you've got no excuse for a little punishment. When you start profitting off of your ability to make exact replicas of other peoples work, with little work of your own, you're really profitting off of their work, not yours - and that's not fair.
-Andrew
Can I download compilers that target .NET (ie, the CLR) from Microsoft for free (gratis) like I can the Java SDK from Sun?
.NET), even they need to give stuff away for free.
Yes, so get off your ignorany little pony and open your eyes. Conecpts behind open source and free software are permeating *every* company these days, so although they may not release Windows under the ownership-stripping GPL, even Microsoft recognizes that to be competitive in some markets (web browsers like IE, Graphic API's like DirectX, and ystem-neutral platforms like
You are free to download the ".NET SDK", link it into an XEmacs mode and develop all you want for the CLR. If you happen to want a full-fledged high-quality IDE and an amazing documentation browser along with it, you'll need to dish out a few dollars for Visual Studio.NET, but the compiler and libraries are in fact, free.
-Andrew
This article is talking about a different kind of spam - That more innocuous kind where someone asks if for an altruistic act on your part. The idea is that if you ask alot of people for help, and they all know you are asking alot of people, a higher percentage will shrug it off in the expectation that you'll get the help somewhere else.
On the other hand, "Do this for yourself!" spam would seem to fall into a whole different category. It's no longer a matter of letting the responsibility for following through fall on someone else, because the act is completely selfish. If you don't do it, *you* don't recieve the "benefits". The study doesn't really address this kind of spam at all.
-Andrew
New York 'No Call' Registry.
I believe there are similar registries for other states. Every quarter, the registry is published and all non-exempt telemarketers must *not* call you if you appear in the registry under penalty of law. Getting in the registry is free and can be done from the above website, if you are a NY resident. Other posters can probably give URL's or addresses for other state registries.
-Andrew
Some key subjects to avoid: Tibet, Falun Gong, democracy in China, and porn.
What, no link for the last one?
-Andrew