I guess we'll never get rid of spam since there continue to be enough stupid people in the world who will not only read the crap, but go out and buy it!
...
Too bad it will never happen and we'll have to rely on Uncle Sam to 'protect' us (well, maybe just the stupid people)
That's the problem right there. The saps. Without them spam would have failed ages ago, along with all the crap the offer. Problem is, you can't create laws against being a gullible sap, it has been tried before in many other forms, but the unethical combined with the witless create a lot of trouble for everyone else (i.e. Notice how in drawing this conclusion I avoid making any references to W., C. and the Enron scandal...oops)
Tossing this into the unsolicited opinion realm (i.e. free speech) makes it a minefield, even before the Direct Merchandising weasels got to lobbying, because poison pills were often included in legislation, by error or intent hard to say, and ultimately laws fail the constitutional test and get tossed out.
Well, because their children died in the polution of heavy metals, their parents died by cancer caused by asbest or burning plastics, their family or friends drunk in a Taifun.
But... hu hom, no one in the US took care to prevent those people dieing.
The irony is, most of these electronics are coming from there. We're just returning them after we've accumulated some dust in it and saw a sexier model at the store.
Political will in the US Government? Surely you're mistaken. Oh, sure they all jumped up and said their piece after Sept, 11, and a bunch of them actually are behind campaign finance reform, but they only do this AFTER it's a problem. Well, spam's a problem, but they've let phone solicitors drive us to screen messages on answering machines (which I swore I never would do, but do now) and all this BS is some twisting of "Freedom of Speech".
I'd like to see the House, Senate and Administration actually come up with some relief legislation on this and crack down hard. Pity, they won't do it, but they saddle us with DMCA.
I'd call that largely coincidence. I think there's just more cretins trying testing the waters and it's going to get much, much worse. One thing I recently did was mask my email address on my web pages, and it's had a pretty fast impact. This leads me to suspect many spammers aren't even buying the CD's full of email addresses, but directly harvesting themselves.
Keep in mind, if you get 1% of 1.7 million people to send you $5, you've more than paid for your efforts, that's what has to be fought, the spammer at the pocketbook.
Back in 1986 we had an IBM 360/40, one of those old punch card systems with core memory and all. It served our needs for finance until we moved everything onto one system for records and finance.
The old 360 was crated up, and sent to Altanta GA, from there it was to put aboard a ship (Savannah?) and sent to Hong Kong, where I was told families bid on parts of the system. The families would take home their share and, like a cottage industry, strip it down to it the various recycleable parts. (I was told the 360 had a significant amount of gold in it.) From there the valuable amount would be sold, no mention of what became of the remainder. This would appear to be where it went, tossed into a river, rather than the families paying someone else to cart away what they couldn't sell.
So rather than blaming the US, in general, you might want to start by considering the people who buy these things and toss the remnants, or the middlemen who make a living carting it there to auction off to them. Taiwan, as I've heard, has a serious problem with metals in their water, from industrial production and probably lack of a well organised, legal and ethical means of disposal. Even dumping old capacitors in the sea could return PVP's and other compounds in fish and shellfish, which many of these communities depend upon heavily.
I just bought the directors cut dvd a month ago. This is getting to be a bit like Pink Floyd CD's, every year or so they re-release with some special editon, gold plate, remaster, etc. I guess I'll just sit tight with what I've got and not bother to see the spiffy new cut. Sigh.
They know they've got fans and they do this to us. Worse, we're supporting the devils in the MPAA buy buying it. Damn...
While the Li-Ion cell taking a hit would certainly be a problem, maybe even starting a fire (is this thing fireproof?) I expect these microfiber wires aren't insulated, themselves. So you get some salts from persperation in there and poof, caustic could be produced. No thanks.
Don't even think about going out in cold weather in cotton, particularly if you plan to do anything which may cause you to break a sweat, since cotton will absorb all the moisture and is a long time drying out. Better to go with Polypropelene or other synthetics of wool if you don't have a reaction. Cotton's not the first choice for shells either as it'll hold water and get heavy.
more for less, except in as fashion statement
on
Self-Warming Jackets
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· Score: 1
dumbass kids.
Try to be more judgemental, ok?
ame kind of kids that buy the "Timberland" boots and leave that stupid leather keychain looking tag on, just so they can show off their newest "Tim'"s with all the logos they can.
This reminded me of reading about electric socks, years ago. You can still find them in sporting goods catalogs. For my money, I take along two pair of socks, one heavy and one light. Wear the heavy ones over the light ones. Quite a bit of this is outdoors common sense.
Some fashionable jackets are actually functional, but I've noticed the tags and extra designer junk gets to be more and more of a hassle. And for hiking boots, I have Raichle, probably one of the best boots on the market and you can hardly tell, because the only tag is tiny, as opposed to the 4 Swooshes i counted on the last pair of Nike boots I saw at the shoe store. My Salomons lasted about 1 year (made in taiwan of pretty much 100% manmade fibers and junk) My Raichles will probably last 20 years (made in Hungary of natural materials and not batteries required.)
Reminds me of when I used to burn still wool, like that as a kid. The fine stuff was great for making homemade fireworks.
Also, reminds me of George Jetson in one episode (when he thought he was going to die) trying out some indestructable suit for Spacely Sprockets to win the Good Spacekeeping Seal. It survived all the tests, but was ruined when Jane put it in the wash. Dry Clean only!
I guess the only downside is that the bike might come with a signed pic of David Hasselhoff. I don't know if I'd want to contaminate my paper shredder with that.
I wouldn't sweat it, the first big orange fireball you passed through would probably take care of it. Can't have anything as gimmicky as that without big orange fireballs appearing from time to time.
Substitute 'are more than' for 'are less than'
on
Self-Warming Jackets
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· Score: 1
Yeah, it's a gaffe. I meant to type an actual running car is less than a pair of Nike's but I'm tired. Or you can just ignore this post and point out the error for my own benefit and thousands of others who couldn't figure out what I mean.
And, BTW, my last Columbia Parka cost about $350, on sale, shell and liner, 2 winters ago. Don't even bother to price sports logo stuff if this shocks you, it's worse.
When I see 'Nasty' and 'Price' and only '$500' when refering to a jacket, I think, "damn, someone hasn't been to the store in a decade." Go price a decent Columbia ski parka.
Reminds me of the bit on Jimmy Buffett's Feeding Frenzy CD, where he refers to his first pickup truck costing less than a pair of sneakers today. Which, if you go look, the new Nike's are less than you can pay for an actual running car.
Now whether you actually need each, that's another question. If I want to stay warm I eat carbs and wear a well insulated jacket.
They have one here in the Calif. central coast area I live in, at a snow board shop. Ok if you want to keep in practice or get ready for the real thing, but no substitute for it. You just stand in place and move from side to side.
What this guy has in mind is like an upended record, on a much larger scale, more terrain to move about in, but ultimately still what I would consider a dull experience. Probably good for teaching beginners and little else, since the inside and outside of the track would be moving at different rates you'd get pretty good at turning one way, but would find difficulty adjusting to a real slope. Nothing like screwing up your motor skills and equilibrium.
What's funny is scammers who forget they gave you their name, address or any other trackable info. One guy near Cleveland, OH, kept putting off sending me a cheap item, still it bugged me. 2-3 months and nothing, his feedback was nearly shot to hell, but still listing things. I lookedup an email for a local police department and fired off a wish to file formal complaint and cc'd him. Got things moving fast.
So, you're riding along, and you're like, shoot, where am I going agian? So you whip out that handy stylus for that PDA, and you start writing. Pretty soon, you realize that you've let go of your handle bars, and run into one of those light posts that keep intruding where you bike.
This is why you pretty much need one button control and it would be near a shifter. I.e. go from the statistics screen to a map (assuming you have a GPS receiver plugged in) My GPS tracks where I'm going, as I go along, showing me going down roads, etc. Maybe more helpful when off road, however, GPS work badly on a moving platform in canyons or among redwoods (even works pretty bad inside a small house, so you get an idea how weak the signals are.)
Another option, is the P Brain, don't know much about it, but it gets good reviews and is one button.
Re:Falling and Breaking
on
Palm on a Bicycle
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· Score: 2, Informative
The one redeeming value of using this setup on a bike would be neat little graphs and transfering the data to your computer.
That's what I use my GPS for, I transfer tracklogs into Topo USA. There's some other software out there, which is shareware (find it on tucows, i think) which will pull tracklogs from a GPS and allow you to put it into graphs.
I forgot to mention that Garmin also has a GPS receiver you can plug into a Palm PDA, and run software on there. My eTrex is about 6oz. and I can even leave little notes in the calendar. It's about as good as I'd need for now. For heavy duty training, though, a bikebrain or bikini is the way to go, since you're probably going to get all technical and start weighing your pasta, like Lance does.
Re:Old news.. been there done that.
on
Palm on a Bicycle
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· Score: 2, Informative
Tough on batteries: That's why I went with NiMH cells, they seem to handle the current drawn and constant recharging much better. They're pretty light cells, too, if you need to carry a backup set.
Garmin, and probably others by now, offer a GPS receiver you can plug into Palms to track your position, probably nice if you want to see which street you're going down.
In town there are PedEx couriers who might benefit from such a device, assuming it doesn't distract them from traffic.
Well, as long as you want to be a worry wart, how about having it stolen?
"Yes officer someone stole my computer."
"I see, is there anything that would distinguish it as yours?"
"Yes, it was attached to a blue Trek 5500 with a raccoon tail on the back of the seat."
I have a couple of the little Vetta and Cat Eye computers (well, hardly computers) on my bike already, just for mileage, speed, etc (I was going downhill about 37 mph yesterday on my mountain bike, whee!) and they're pretty good for basic information. For a few bucks more you can get heartrate and cadence (how fast you pedal) monitors. Bikebrain has had a nice unit which offers pretty much everything for quite a while, there are some high marks for it on rec.bicycles.* newsgroups. I bought a Garmin eTrex GPS to keep track of my rides, hikes, etc, and it has a little bracket which I can put on my handlebar and take it off easily (important since the mountain bike requires major hosing down after most rides) It's shock resistant to some large number of G's, more than I'd survive
It's important to remember that riding with one of these things it's not likely to take much of a beating, since you pretty much have to be there with it and it it's too much for it, you're probably splattered by now. Thou I'm not sure how well a hard disk might work in one, I wouldn't recomend it.
Biggest concerns will actaully be water/dust resistance, since this is what you get in the great outdoors, possibly heat if you ride in the sun a lot (LCD displays turn black if they get too warm, lot of help that would be), other concern is weight. Many riders try to strip weight off bikes, because it takes incrementally more energy to haul it up hills. Tiny Cat Eye and Vetta computers are ideal for everyday riding, where a bike computer I'd only use to chart rides, same as I do with my GPS, to get an idea of the profile and perhaps what cadence worked or didn't for me in the long run. Leave the heavy bits home when you're really out for a ride.
As I've read, Chuck wasn't just a gifted animator, but a good man who took care of his workers and many sought to work for, particularly after the draconian working conditions at Disney.
Tex Avery (Droopy, Red Hot Riding Hood) is another in Chucks League. These guys set the bar few attempt to reach anymore.
I was just reading some of my old Pogo collections and found the legendary cartoonist Walt Kelly and, later his wife, Selby worked with Chuck Jones. The mention of his name reminds me of the finest cartoons I ever saw, bar none, on Saturday mornings. Those old MGM and Warner Bros. cartoons gave me an appreciation for art and even classical music (e.g. Rabbit of Seville) and it was a travesty of epic proportions when the anti-cartoon violence people butchered the cartoons in the 70's.
Chuck was a rare one, gifted as an animator, voice artist, writer and producer.
Yes, a seller in Hong Kong had sold me a few items and I had paid and received them. The one last item, for about $30, didn't show up, so I fired off an email. No reply and then I checked his feedback, and found he had cheated dozens of others. Up to that point he had a clean record with well over 150 positives. I had made my last payment through PayPal, which was recently featured on slashdot, which confirmed he had cleaned out his account before disappering. PayPal never refunded or anything, let that be a warning about how good their insurance is on fraud.
His name is:
Mr.Yeung Yuk Tin
Flat G 30/F Block 16
Namling House Tsuen Wan Centre
Tsuen Wan Hong Kong
And he was selling Anime DVDs when he pulled his scam.
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad it will never happen and we'll have to rely on Uncle Sam to 'protect' us (well, maybe just the stupid people)
That's the problem right there. The saps. Without them spam would have failed ages ago, along with all the crap the offer. Problem is, you can't create laws against being a gullible sap, it has been tried before in many other forms, but the unethical combined with the witless create a lot of trouble for everyone else (i.e. Notice how in drawing this conclusion I avoid making any references to W., C. and the Enron scandal...oops)
Tossing this into the unsolicited opinion realm (i.e. free speech) makes it a minefield, even before the Direct Merchandising weasels got to lobbying, because poison pills were often included in legislation, by error or intent hard to say, and ultimately laws fail the constitutional test and get tossed out.
Well, because their children died in the polution of heavy metals, their parents died by cancer caused by asbest or burning plastics, their family or friends drunk in a Taifun.
But ... hu hom, no one in the US took care to prevent those people dieing.
The irony is, most of these electronics are coming from there. We're just returning them after we've accumulated some dust in it and saw a sexier model at the store.
I'd like to see the House, Senate and Administration actually come up with some relief legislation on this and crack down hard. Pity, they won't do it, but they saddle us with DMCA.
Keep in mind, if you get 1% of 1.7 million people to send you $5, you've more than paid for your efforts, that's what has to be fought, the spammer at the pocketbook.
Of course, we usually brought back more from Dayton or Findlay than we took, I guess we must have been part of the solution. ;)
Imagine, a Beowulf cluster of recycled computers. :)
The old 360 was crated up, and sent to Altanta GA, from there it was to put aboard a ship (Savannah?) and sent to Hong Kong, where I was told families bid on parts of the system. The families would take home their share and, like a cottage industry, strip it down to it the various recycleable parts. (I was told the 360 had a significant amount of gold in it.) From there the valuable amount would be sold, no mention of what became of the remainder. This would appear to be where it went, tossed into a river, rather than the families paying someone else to cart away what they couldn't sell.
So rather than blaming the US, in general, you might want to start by considering the people who buy these things and toss the remnants, or the middlemen who make a living carting it there to auction off to them. Taiwan, as I've heard, has a serious problem with metals in their water, from industrial production and probably lack of a well organised, legal and ethical means of disposal. Even dumping old capacitors in the sea could return PVP's and other compounds in fish and shellfish, which many of these communities depend upon heavily.
I'd like the theme to mule, please, good enough quality so I can drive around town with it cranked up. :)
They know they've got fans and they do this to us. Worse, we're supporting the devils in the MPAA buy buying it. Damn...
While the Li-Ion cell taking a hit would certainly be a problem, maybe even starting a fire (is this thing fireproof?) I expect these microfiber wires aren't insulated, themselves. So you get some salts from persperation in there and poof, caustic could be produced. No thanks.
Don't even think about going out in cold weather in cotton, particularly if you plan to do anything which may cause you to break a sweat, since cotton will absorb all the moisture and is a long time drying out. Better to go with Polypropelene or other synthetics of wool if you don't have a reaction. Cotton's not the first choice for shells either as it'll hold water and get heavy.
Try to be more judgemental, ok?
ame kind of kids that buy the "Timberland" boots and leave that stupid leather keychain looking tag on, just so they can show off their newest "Tim'"s with all the logos they can.
This reminded me of reading about electric socks, years ago. You can still find them in sporting goods catalogs. For my money, I take along two pair of socks, one heavy and one light. Wear the heavy ones over the light ones. Quite a bit of this is outdoors common sense.
Some fashionable jackets are actually functional, but I've noticed the tags and extra designer junk gets to be more and more of a hassle. And for hiking boots, I have Raichle, probably one of the best boots on the market and you can hardly tell, because the only tag is tiny, as opposed to the 4 Swooshes i counted on the last pair of Nike boots I saw at the shoe store. My Salomons lasted about 1 year (made in taiwan of pretty much 100% manmade fibers and junk) My Raichles will probably last 20 years (made in Hungary of natural materials and not batteries required.)
Also, reminds me of George Jetson in one episode (when he thought he was going to die) trying out some indestructable suit for Spacely Sprockets to win the Good Spacekeeping Seal. It survived all the tests, but was ruined when Jane put it in the wash. Dry Clean only!
I wouldn't sweat it, the first big orange fireball you passed through would probably take care of it. Can't have anything as gimmicky as that without big orange fireballs appearing from time to time.
And, BTW, my last Columbia Parka cost about $350, on sale, shell and liner, 2 winters ago. Don't even bother to price sports logo stuff if this shocks you, it's worse.
Reminds me of the bit on Jimmy Buffett's Feeding Frenzy CD, where he refers to his first pickup truck costing less than a pair of sneakers today. Which, if you go look, the new Nike's are less than you can pay for an actual running car.
Now whether you actually need each, that's another question. If I want to stay warm I eat carbs and wear a well insulated jacket.
What this guy has in mind is like an upended record, on a much larger scale, more terrain to move about in, but ultimately still what I would consider a dull experience. Probably good for teaching beginners and little else, since the inside and outside of the track would be moving at different rates you'd get pretty good at turning one way, but would find difficulty adjusting to a real slope. Nothing like screwing up your motor skills and equilibrium.
IMHO it looks terrible. I'm sure it'll be a hit.
What's funny is scammers who forget they gave you their name, address or any other trackable info. One guy near Cleveland, OH, kept putting off sending me a cheap item, still it bugged me. 2-3 months and nothing, his feedback was nearly shot to hell, but still listing things. I lookedup an email for a local police department and fired off a wish to file formal complaint and cc'd him. Got things moving fast.
This is why you pretty much need one button control and it would be near a shifter. I.e. go from the statistics screen to a map (assuming you have a GPS receiver plugged in) My GPS tracks where I'm going, as I go along, showing me going down roads, etc. Maybe more helpful when off road, however, GPS work badly on a moving platform in canyons or among redwoods (even works pretty bad inside a small house, so you get an idea how weak the signals are.)
Another option, is the P Brain, don't know much about it, but it gets good reviews and is one button.
That's what I use my GPS for, I transfer tracklogs into Topo USA. There's some other software out there, which is shareware (find it on tucows, i think) which will pull tracklogs from a GPS and allow you to put it into graphs.
I forgot to mention that Garmin also has a GPS receiver you can plug into a Palm PDA, and run software on there. My eTrex is about 6oz. and I can even leave little notes in the calendar. It's about as good as I'd need for now. For heavy duty training, though, a bikebrain or bikini is the way to go, since you're probably going to get all technical and start weighing your pasta, like Lance does.
Garmin, and probably others by now, offer a GPS receiver you can plug into Palms to track your position, probably nice if you want to see which street you're going down.
In town there are PedEx couriers who might benefit from such a device, assuming it doesn't distract them from traffic.
"Yes officer someone stole my computer."
"I see, is there anything that would distinguish it as yours?"
"Yes, it was attached to a blue Trek 5500 with a raccoon tail on the back of the seat."
I have a couple of the little Vetta and Cat Eye computers (well, hardly computers) on my bike already, just for mileage, speed, etc (I was going downhill about 37 mph yesterday on my mountain bike, whee!) and they're pretty good for basic information. For a few bucks more you can get heartrate and cadence (how fast you pedal) monitors. Bikebrain has had a nice unit which offers pretty much everything for quite a while, there are some high marks for it on rec.bicycles.* newsgroups. I bought a Garmin eTrex GPS to keep track of my rides, hikes, etc, and it has a little bracket which I can put on my handlebar and take it off easily (important since the mountain bike requires major hosing down after most rides) It's shock resistant to some large number of G's, more than I'd survive
It's important to remember that riding with one of these things it's not likely to take much of a beating, since you pretty much have to be there with it and it it's too much for it, you're probably splattered by now. Thou I'm not sure how well a hard disk might work in one, I wouldn't recomend it.
Biggest concerns will actaully be water/dust resistance, since this is what you get in the great outdoors, possibly heat if you ride in the sun a lot (LCD displays turn black if they get too warm, lot of help that would be), other concern is weight. Many riders try to strip weight off bikes, because it takes incrementally more energy to haul it up hills. Tiny Cat Eye and Vetta computers are ideal for everyday riding, where a bike computer I'd only use to chart rides, same as I do with my GPS, to get an idea of the profile and perhaps what cadence worked or didn't for me in the long run. Leave the heavy bits home when you're really out for a ride.
Tex Avery (Droopy, Red Hot Riding Hood) is another in Chucks League. These guys set the bar few attempt to reach anymore.
Chuck was a rare one, gifted as an animator, voice artist, writer and producer.
His name is:
Mr.Yeung Yuk Tin
Flat G 30/F Block 16
Namling House Tsuen Wan Centre
Tsuen Wan Hong Kong
And he was selling Anime DVDs when he pulled his scam.