In order to get a SCUBA tank filled with compressed air you have to flash certification credentials saying that you've the knowledge to use it without killing yourself.
Could ISP's not require _some_ sort of credentials assuring them that you've a clue?
I see an apalling level of ignorance, from modern electronic office workers, whose _jobs_ consist of reading and sending email, building webpages, making PowerPoint presentations, expressing themselves via "desktop publishing" & spreadsheets, doing www research, and on and on. Despite _making_a_living_ off their computer "skills", they're totally clueless.
But then, plenty of the licensed motor vehicle operators I see are clueless, too, and the fact that they had to get a license first does not help them - one bit.
I don't remember it being half bad, at least not until very late into it when, like "The Number Of The Beast", it merged back into the Lazarus Long story. It was always going there, but the trip was quite enjoyable, with a lot of the flavor of "juveniles" like "Have Space Suit...", up until its destination was achieved.
... and guilty of the only valid reason for sci-fi... To make the reader think, question their values, their supposedly beneficial education, and so on.
But that's mistaken. Heinlein himself stated (in "Expanded Universe") that his motivation for writing was, in general, to put a roof over his head and food on his table. He ridiculed "Art For Art's Sake(tm)", and fostered no illusions about the common yokels' interest in thought, values, or education. He wrote Science Fiction because it was something he could sell. He fully realized that, in asking you to spend your money on one of his books instead of beer, he had to entertain you more than the beer would. That's all. Of course he did his job excellently, and that's his claim to greatness.
"Starship Troopers" is exceptional in that he wrote it in anger, to grind at a political axe, and did not care if it made him money. It was rather ironic (and a big surprise to the Author) that it turned out to be one of his best sellers.
But the "History & Moral Philosophy" lectures
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were the whole point of "Starship Troopers"!
Verhooven missed that, entirely, so he threw in a bunch of sadism (DI sticking a knife through a recruit's hand for _no_reason_), fascism (service == citizenship commercials) and sex (Dina Meyer) that were absent in the book, I guess to keep the teenagers interested?
Heinlein's Federal Service did NOT advertize. Instead they made gruesome examples of disabled vetrans to _discourage_ rash youth from enlistment. One percent of the enlistees completed basic training, most left voluntarily. All were free to resign at any time (other than during an actual engagement). Doesn't sound like any fascist society I've ever heard of.
I gave the book to the SO's seventeen-year-old, the opening chapter grabbed him firmly by the imagination and he read it in about a day. (Only thing I ever saw him actually read, besides the D&D, MechWarrior, and CyberPunk manuals). I never quizzed hin on the H&MP so I don't know if he understood that. But I did learn how to get these young kids' attention: Mechs!
<rant> It's not as if there _aren't_ fine RAH stories with plenty of sex and violence, and into which Mr. Verhooven could easily have patched a hottie like Dina and additional sex if he had wanted. How about "Glory Road"? Cripes, it has nude beaches! Or "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls"? Indeed, even something as intellectual as "Beyond This Horizon" has sex, socialism, human genetic engineering (to outrage the fascism theorists), a couple of gunfights (one of which could be amplified, just a tiny bit, into a _major_ shootout on the scale of "Invasion USA" if desired), and men who wore nail polish. Shit, how about "Friday"? Additional gratuitous sex could be added at random to many Heinlein stories, with no damage. Instead he picked about the least appropriate one to pump sex into, and used it to replace the central theme, which he obviously failed to understand (if he was _trying_ for a sarcastic parody, he failed miserably IMHO, and would have been much better off to just go with a straight adaptaion of the book)! </rant>
"A hack-and-slash-hero-gets-the-bitch-flick"? Exactly. With "RAH's Starship Troopers" for a title, I expected better. I also expected powered armor.
Somebody up there remarked that he liked the book, and the movie, and the coincidence that they shared the same title and major characters' names. There, however, the resemblence ends.
I, OTOH, thought the movie was rather lame, and would have paid very little attention to it if it were not for that title. I'm outraged that someone did _that_ to ST.
Moderators _still_ smoking crack, I see.....
on
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...eventually I came to the realization that even his worst book (possibly I will fear no evil?) is well above the average; I was just spoiled by the incomparable ones like Starship Troopers, stranger, harsh mistress, have spacesuit: will travel, citizen of the Galaxy, Glory Road...
I'd call that +1 Insightful
"I Will Fear No Evil" was written while he was dog sick, and completed by his wife and agent IIRC.
I also keep thinking of him in comparison to Hubbard; L. Ron set out to design and build a religion, bent all his imagination and creativity to the purpose, and succeeded.
...I'm sure the guy is a wonderfully prolific sci-fi hack...
<BLOWTORCH> No, he wrote about a book a year, when he did not have health problems, and this was never anywhere near enough to satisfy his fans' jones for "more please", hence our joy and excitement at the discovery of something we haven't already read. There is a major difference between a 'hack' and a MASTER, and Heinlein was awarded the first ever Lifetime Grand Master award by the Science Fiction Writers of America, as well as numerous Hugos, including 2 posthumous 'retros' in 2000 for stuff written in 1950. He's regarded by many of us as simply the best. </blowtorch>
And that would be bad how?
on
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I hope and pray Heinlen doesn't turn into the 'Tu-Pac' of geeks (i.e. ends up having 30 or more works 'discovered').
I'd prefer to hope and pray that he does.
Without any familiarity whatsoever with the work of "Tu-Pac", I'll state for the record that if someone were to find a box of unpublished Heinlein stuff (say, 20 or 30 shorts, or maybe a handful of novels), it would be a very wonderful thing for Science Fiction, certainly far better than the entire 2 seasons of ST:Enterprise has been.
Seth, you're really starting to piss me off. I should shoot that high horse right out from under you. I have a gang under my command, and we know where you live and work. If you don't shut up, I guarantee that you won't like what we're cooking up to use against you.
The last time I checked, a high horse was a fictional animal. Shooting one would hardly be a crime. It would in fact be damn hard to get a good sight picture on the bugger anyway.
And "what we're cooking up to use against you" could amount to a batch of special brownies. That's far too vague a threat to be actionable.
"I know where you live. You better sleep with one eye open, just in case I come and bring Mr. Desert Eagle to pay you a little visit some night" would be much more specific.
IANAL, so I don't know at what point this sort of thing quits being mere speech and becomes actionable as a threat.
I'd say that the chances are pretty good that WPS Office only understands and displays simplified Mandarin, or some other popular Chinese dialect. If it does Engrish at all it would probably be pretty incomprehensible. The idea that we'll use this in the west is delusional.
Nonetheless I'm all for the Chinese government throwing out the Evil Empire. I wish ours had the stones to.
...one must send economic signals up the chain if one wants change. I won't pirate from the RIAA, but I am boycotting them until they come to their senses and distribute via convenient channels at fair prices.
You forgot the part about the decent music. Make that: "I won't pirate from the riaa, but I am boycotting them until they come to their senses and distribute some decent music via convenient channels at fair prices."
DOH! And add: "And quit screwing their artists", too.
So if a spammer [says] "I am a spammer", it means that they're not?
Empirically, no spammer has said "I am a spammer", ever. Thus the rule holds.
No, no no. The three rules of spammers are:
1. Spammers lie.
2. If a spammer appears to be telling the truth, see Rule#1.
3. Spammers are stupid (or they'd be rich, and not spammers).
So if a spammer _were_ to say: "I'm a spammer" (which, again, has never happened in the history of the known Universe), that would mean that:
A. He's too stupid to understand what spam is (examples of this are abundant).
B. He honestly does not believe that he's a spammer (again, examples abound).
C. And he's lying (in his mind) by saying that he _is_ a spammer. There are no examples of this, since no spammer would ever be motivated to _say_ they were a spammer.
It would be an example of Rule #3 and #2 working in concert, NOT a failure of Rule #1.
Yeah, and after eighteen years of soldering things I can tell the differnce between a 600 degree (F) soldering iron and a 900 degree one. It's not so much a metter of grabbing the iron as brushing it lightly. A 600 degree iron (one that's not really working right) will give you a blister, but a 900 degree, properly operating soldering iron will immediately turn your epidermal skin into white ash.
I doubt it. Unless of course you try to hold a wrench across it, in which case you'll get burned but not electrocuted.
Get out Ohm's law: V=IR.
Yer skin has a pretty high resistance (5-50 KOhms). Combine that with 110/220 V and you get something on the order of 10-50 mA. This is dangerous, particularly if it goes through yer heart, and if sustained will cook (burn) the tissues of your body, which is also bad. For a fun experiment (or an emergency hot-dog cooker), take a raw hot dog and stick 10-14ga wires about 1/2 inch (stripped, of course!) into each end. Put the 110 V supply across these wires and see how long it takes to cook a weiner. About 60 seconds is my recollection. (For a US "frankfurter" which is 1/2 inch in diameter. Obviously the much more massive brautwurst & such common in the EC would take much longer. Or maybe not, as you might also be dealing with a 220V supply.)
5 V / 5 KOhms = 1 mA which is harmless. You _might_ feel something if you wet your hands and put them across the 5V 600A supply. Go grab the terminals of your (12 Volt, 200 A) car battery, and see if you can feel anything.
A steel wrench OTOH has a resistance of about 0.001 Ohm. Combine this with 5 V and you get the full current capability of the power supply. 600 Amps might not make a wrench actually explode, but it _will_ make a scary noise and do some serious fusion damage to both the wrench and the points where it comes into contact with the power bus. If you manage to rest it across the bus, so that it will stay (you will NOT want to hold it), and your PS is really good for 600A, _something_ will melt or catch fire. (Hopefully that will be one of the fist-sized fuses, but you never know for sure....)
Last week I was working on my dad's computer. I had the power on, and was feeling all the chips to see if any were untowardly hot. The OM asked if I should be sticking my hands in there with the power on. He cut his teeth on electronics which used Edison valves for active devices, which had plate voltages up into the hundreds of volts. You did NOT touch such circutry when it was hot. My reply was that there wasn't anything more than 12 Volts in the whole box and most of it was at 5 Volts. This seemed to satisfied him, probably because he's used to thinking in terms of 1A power supplies, and hadn't the slightest fsckin' clue that the PS of his computer is capable of 60 A - at five Volts.
And I wouldn't touch MS for mission critical stuff even if they paid me... well actually I'd touch the box if they paid me, and I'd install it if someone else wants it and "ahem" PAYS me:)
So, how to handle it in a friendly and intelligent manner?
_Friendliness?_ You're kidding, right?
If someone wearing a ski mask picks my lock, comes in my door, and tries to shove an advertizement in my face, my reaction is going to be to put an extra hole or two in his ski mask, about the size of a.40 S&W. These guys are past friendliness.
1. The Evil Empire plans to start up a new, "Google-killing" "search" "engine" 2. The Evil Empire releases a "report"(=~/FUD/) slamming Google. 3. ??? 4. Profit!
Heil hitler, and toss another email on the fire eh?
Hey, wait your turn. There are a lot of guys in front of you and we all have multiple bushel baskets of the shite.
I thought/. readers were a bit more forward thinking than they have demonstrated in this thread.
I can't speak for _everyone_ here, but I suspect that if you took a poll, you'd find that our average tolerance for spam has passed zero and is falling down into the negative numbers. We do think forward, but all we see there is exponential growth of spam unless something devastating is done about it and FAST.
Is unsoclicted direct mail in your regular mailbox "tresspass to chattels" as well?
I would like to say so, but IMU that wood mail box technically belongs to the USPS, or some other such loophole severely restricts my control over it. I'm going to scrounge up a free beer grabage can to put under the mailboxes at my apartment. I bet it'll get a LOT of business.
...I draw the line when honest businessmen, arent allowed to send even one unsolicted advertisement. If the offer is bonafide, the headers aren't forged, it's not bulk, the message is clearly marked ADV:, and requests not to recieve future mail are honored... the commercial mail should be allowed!
Too Bad. It's MY mailbox. I'd say that if you'll mark it "ADV:" or something equally easy to filter, that may mitigate your crime to the point where I might not advocate keelhauling as a penalty, but OTOH my ISP would then be faced with filtering the million "legitimate" ADV: spams that he'd receive every day for me, and I know he won't be able to do that for free.
Any attmept to prohobit [any and all advertising of any kind, not limited to spam] sets a dangerous anti-capitalistic precedent....
I'm sorry, but while I'm generally in favor of capitalism, I consider advertizing to be one of its more sinister excesses, especially when it's carried to such an extent that I can't open my eyes anymore without having to look at someone's commercial. I'd VERY much like to see an experiment in which ALL advertizing is banned, for, say, a year. Your claim is that, without advertizing, capitalism would fail, and I simply do not believe that that would happen. I think all consumers would be happier without the megaphone constantly blaring into their ear, and business would go on regardless. Except, I guess, the advertizing business, oh well. I'll remind everyone that the buggy-whip business pretty much took it in the shorts when automobiles were introduced, and no one (outside the buggy-whip industry) considered it to be any huge loss.
Being a businessman and an advertiser, you're suffering under the delusion that, because you have a message which is important to _you_ and which you want very much for me to see, that _I_ must therefore want to see it. I DO NOT. You're suffering under the delusion that you have some kind of "right" to get your message to me. YOU DO NOT. To the extent that advertizing interferes with my life (and this extent increases daily) you have NO right to my time. It's MY life. They're MY eyes, and I have the right to choose to NOT want to see it.
You (or any other advertizer) are NOT building "brand recognition", "positive consumer attitide", or any other kind of good public relations by intruding into our lives. All you're building is resentment and animosity. GO AWAY.
And we will keep returning the _same_ answer, which you in your marketing frenzy are unable to comprehend.
I own a small IT business,
Good for you.
and I occaisonally send out 20 mails or so to people whom I don't know but who I think may be interested in my services
EAT SHIT AND DIE, SPAMMER!
Is this spam?
Did your victims solicit, request, or otherwise authorize these communications? I suspect NOT, since you state that you do not know them. This makes your communications spam regardless of your intentions, your business, your desire to communicate, your "First Ammendment Right To Free Speech(tm)" or any other delusions you may subscribe to. Spam is trespass on chattels. MY mailbox. MY property. The concept that this is wrong and punishable dates back hundreds of years.
If so, how about 1
If unsolicited, it's still spam.
where does legitimate marketing end and spam begin?
"Advertising" ends at my property, where it becomes tresspass and my right to use force to stop it begins. There is no such thing as "legitimate marketing", that's a fantasy the advertising industry is trying to get you to buy. GET IT ALL OUT OF MY SIGHT!
You must be too young to have read The Purple Book. The entire IBM-PC is defined there, there's even a schematic for the power supply, and an assembler listing of the BIOS source code. NONE of it needed to be reverse-engineered.
A big question in the early days of the PC was: "Well, just how _closely_ is IBM gonna permit people to build to this spec?"
It turned out that IBM made no attempt to protect _any_part_ of what came to be known as the "ISA" other than their ROM BIOS. When Compaq copied _that_, they sued. Compaq hastily contracted with Phoenix Software to come up with a non-infringing 'clean-room' BIOS, which facilitated a settlement, about the same month that they would have been crushed without it. With it, they were able to continue down the road to becoming the dominant suplier of electrical clones.
With the legal question of "Just exactly _how_ 'open' is this machine?" answered, the clone floodgates were opened.
The rest of your statement is about as befuddled. The reason 32-bit protected mode OSsen took a while to come around was because 32-bit protected mode hardware wasn't available until the 80386 was released.
Slashdot Mirror
...
If you try to drive
I'll tax the street
If you try to walk
I'll tax your feet....
Yeah, that was it.
In order to get a SCUBA tank filled with compressed air you have to flash certification credentials saying that you've the knowledge to use it without killing yourself.
Could ISP's not require _some_ sort of credentials assuring them that you've a clue?
I see an apalling level of ignorance, from modern electronic office workers, whose _jobs_ consist of reading and sending email, building webpages, making PowerPoint presentations, expressing themselves via "desktop publishing" & spreadsheets, doing www research, and on and on. Despite _making_a_living_ off their computer "skills", they're totally clueless.
But then, plenty of the licensed motor vehicle operators I see are clueless, too, and the fact that they had to get a license first does not help them - one bit.
To drive a car
to fly an airplane
to use any radio transmitter beyond minimal power walkie-talkies, cellphones or 802.11.
All these things are done to help enhance the safety of everyone using the medium.
The signal to noise ratio of the Internet (maybe I oughta make that noise to signal) is typical of things which are totally out of control...
...CAt who walks through walls sucked BAD...
And that's the consensus here.
I don't remember it being half bad, at least not until very late into it when, like "The Number Of The Beast", it merged back into the Lazarus Long story. It was always going there, but the trip was quite enjoyable, with a lot of the flavor of "juveniles" like "Have Space Suit...", up until its destination was achieved.
Hmm. Heinlein was indeed a genius...
Agreed, completely.
But that's mistaken. Heinlein himself stated (in "Expanded Universe") that his motivation for writing was, in general, to put a roof over his head and food on his table. He ridiculed "Art For Art's Sake(tm)", and fostered no illusions about the common yokels' interest in thought, values, or education. He wrote Science Fiction because it was something he could sell. He fully realized that, in asking you to spend your money on one of his books instead of beer, he had to entertain you more than the beer would. That's all. Of course he did his job excellently, and that's his claim to greatness.
"Starship Troopers" is exceptional in that he wrote it in anger, to grind at a political axe, and did not care if it made him money. It was rather ironic (and a big surprise to the Author) that it turned out to be one of his best sellers.
were the whole point of "Starship Troopers"!
Verhooven missed that, entirely, so he threw in a bunch of sadism (DI sticking a knife through a recruit's hand for _no_reason_), fascism (service == citizenship commercials) and sex (Dina Meyer) that were absent in the book, I guess to keep the teenagers interested?
Heinlein's Federal Service did NOT advertize. Instead they made gruesome examples of disabled vetrans to _discourage_ rash youth from enlistment. One percent of the enlistees completed basic training, most left voluntarily. All were free to resign at any time (other than during an actual engagement). Doesn't sound like any fascist society I've ever heard of.
Then Verhooven left out the powered armor. Idiot. Would you like to see more?
I gave the book to the SO's seventeen-year-old, the opening chapter grabbed him firmly by the imagination and he read it in about a day. (Only thing I ever saw him actually read, besides the D&D, MechWarrior, and CyberPunk manuals). I never quizzed hin on the H&MP so I don't know if he understood that. But I did learn how to get these young kids' attention: Mechs!
<rant>
It's not as if there _aren't_ fine RAH stories with plenty of sex and violence, and into which Mr. Verhooven could easily have patched a hottie like Dina and additional sex if he had wanted. How about "Glory Road"? Cripes, it has nude beaches! Or "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls"? Indeed, even something as intellectual as "Beyond This Horizon" has sex, socialism, human genetic engineering (to outrage the fascism theorists), a couple of gunfights (one of which could be amplified, just a tiny bit, into a _major_ shootout on the scale of "Invasion USA" if desired), and men who wore nail polish. Shit, how about "Friday"? Additional gratuitous sex could be added at random to many Heinlein stories, with no damage. Instead he picked about the least appropriate one to pump sex into, and used it to replace the central theme, which he obviously failed to understand (if he was _trying_ for a sarcastic parody, he failed miserably IMHO, and would have been much better off to just go with a straight adaptaion of the book)!
</rant>
"A hack-and-slash-hero-gets-the-bitch-flick"? Exactly. With "RAH's Starship Troopers" for a title, I expected better. I also expected powered armor.
Somebody up there remarked that he liked the book, and the movie, and the coincidence that they shared the same title and major characters' names. There, however, the resemblence ends.
I, OTOH, thought the movie was rather lame, and would have paid very little attention to it if it were not for that title. I'm outraged that someone did _that_ to ST.
I'd call that +1 Insightful
"I Will Fear No Evil" was written while he was dog sick, and completed by his wife and agent IIRC.
I also keep thinking of him in comparison to Hubbard;
L. Ron set out to design and build a religion, bent all his imagination and creativity to the purpose, and succeeded.
Well, for a value of "success" amounting to a pretty crappy excuse for a church.
RAH "merely" wrote stories, and accidentaly created at least 1 religion, and improved many peoples lives along the way.
I'd point out the Hubbard likely got the religion idea from one of RAH's offhand remarks.
_Overrated_!?! At +1?
Time to go metamoderate.
<BLOWTORCH>
No, he wrote about a book a year, when he did not have health problems, and this was never anywhere near enough to satisfy his fans' jones for "more please", hence our joy and excitement at the discovery of something we haven't already read. There is a major difference between a 'hack' and a MASTER, and Heinlein was awarded the first ever Lifetime Grand Master award by the Science Fiction Writers of America, as well as numerous Hugos, including 2 posthumous 'retros' in 2000 for stuff written in 1950. He's regarded by many of us as simply the best.
<
I hope and pray Heinlen doesn't turn into the 'Tu-Pac' of geeks (i.e. ends up having 30 or more works 'discovered').
I'd prefer to hope and pray that he does.
Without any familiarity whatsoever with the work of "Tu-Pac", I'll state for the record that if someone were to find a box of unpublished Heinlein stuff (say, 20 or 30 shorts, or maybe a handful of novels), it would be a very wonderful thing for Science Fiction, certainly far better than the entire 2 seasons of ST:Enterprise has been.
You see what a fuss just one has caused.
Seth, you're really starting to piss me off. I should shoot that high horse right out from under you. I have a gang under my command, and we know where you live and work. If you don't shut up, I guarantee that you won't like what we're cooking up to use against you.
The last time I checked, a high horse was a fictional animal.
Shooting one would hardly be a crime. It would in fact be damn hard to get a good sight picture on the bugger anyway.
And "what we're cooking up to use against you" could amount to a batch of special brownies. That's far too vague a threat to be actionable.
"I know where you live. You better sleep with one eye open, just in case I come and bring Mr. Desert Eagle to pay you a little visit some night" would be much more specific.
IANAL, so I don't know at what point this sort of thing quits being mere speech and becomes actionable as a threat.
I'd say that the chances are pretty good that WPS Office only understands and displays simplified Mandarin, or some other popular Chinese dialect. If it does Engrish at all it would probably be pretty incomprehensible. The idea that we'll use this in the west is delusional.
Nonetheless I'm all for the Chinese government throwing out the Evil Empire. I wish ours had the stones to.
Get real, when have the users ever been allowed to pick their own software, regardless of the country in question?
In Soviet Russia, Software picks you!
...one must send economic signals up the chain if one wants change. I won't pirate from the RIAA, but I am boycotting them until they come to their senses and distribute via convenient channels at fair prices.
You forgot the part about the decent music. Make that:
"I won't pirate from the riaa, but I am boycotting them until they come to their senses and distribute some decent music via convenient channels at fair prices."
DOH! And add: "And quit screwing their artists", too.
So if a spammer [says] "I am a spammer", it means that they're not?
Empirically, no spammer has said "I am a spammer", ever. Thus the rule holds.
No, no no. The three rules of spammers are:
1. Spammers lie.
2. If a spammer appears to be telling the truth, see Rule#1.
3. Spammers are stupid (or they'd be rich, and not spammers).
So if a spammer _were_ to say: "I'm a spammer" (which, again, has never happened in the history of the known Universe), that would mean that:
A. He's too stupid to understand what spam is (examples of this are abundant).
B. He honestly does not believe that he's a spammer (again, examples abound).
C. And he's lying (in his mind) by saying that he _is_ a spammer. There are no examples of this, since no spammer would ever be motivated to _say_ they were a spammer.
It would be an example of Rule #3 and #2 working in concert, NOT a failure of Rule #1.
Yeah, and after eighteen years of soldering things I can tell the differnce between a 600 degree (F) soldering iron and a 900 degree one. It's not so much a metter of grabbing the iron as brushing it lightly. A 600 degree iron (one that's not really working right) will give you a blister, but a 900 degree, properly operating soldering iron will immediately turn your epidermal skin into white ash.
5V can kill.
I doubt it. Unless of course you try to hold a wrench across it, in which case you'll get burned but not electrocuted.
Get out Ohm's law: V=IR.
Yer skin has a pretty high resistance (5-50 KOhms). Combine that with 110/220 V and you get something on the order of 10-50 mA. This is dangerous, particularly if it goes through yer heart, and if sustained will cook (burn) the tissues of your body, which is also bad. For a fun experiment (or an emergency hot-dog cooker), take a raw hot dog and stick 10-14ga wires about 1/2 inch (stripped, of course!) into each end. Put the 110 V supply across these wires and see how long it takes to cook a weiner. About 60 seconds is my recollection. (For a US "frankfurter" which is 1/2 inch in diameter. Obviously the much more massive brautwurst & such common in the EC would take much longer. Or maybe not, as you might also be dealing with a 220V supply.)
5 V / 5 KOhms = 1 mA which is harmless. You _might_ feel something if you wet your hands and put them across the 5V 600A supply. Go grab the terminals of your (12 Volt, 200 A) car battery, and see if you can feel anything.
A steel wrench OTOH has a resistance of about 0.001 Ohm. Combine this with 5 V and you get the full current capability of the power supply. 600 Amps might not make a wrench actually explode, but it _will_ make a scary noise and do some serious fusion damage to both the wrench and the points where it comes into contact with the power bus. If you manage to rest it across the bus, so that it will stay (you will NOT want to hold it), and your PS is really good for 600A, _something_ will melt or catch fire. (Hopefully that will be one of the fist-sized fuses, but you never know for sure....)
Last week I was working on my dad's computer. I had the power on, and was feeling all the chips to see if any were untowardly hot. The OM asked if I should be sticking my hands in there with the power on. He cut his teeth on electronics which used Edison valves for active devices, which had plate voltages up into the hundreds of volts. You did NOT touch such circutry when it was hot. My reply was that there wasn't anything more than 12 Volts in the whole box and most of it was at 5 Volts. This seemed to satisfied him, probably because he's used to thinking in terms of 1A power supplies, and hadn't the slightest fsckin' clue that the PS of his computer is capable of 60 A - at five Volts.
And I wouldn't touch MS for mission critical stuff even if they paid me... well actually I'd touch the box if they paid me, and I'd install it if someone else wants it and "ahem" PAYS me :)
Whore.
So, how to handle it in a friendly and intelligent manner?
.40 S&W. These guys are past friendliness.
_Friendliness?_ You're kidding, right?
If someone wearing a ski mask picks my lock, comes in my door, and tries to shove an advertizement in my face, my reaction is going to be to put an extra hole or two in his ski mask, about the size of a
1. The Evil Empire plans to start up a new, "Google-killing" "search" "engine"
2. The Evil Empire releases a "report"(=~/FUD/) slamming Google.
3. ???
4. Profit!
Hey, wait your turn. There are a lot of guys in front of you and we all have multiple bushel baskets of the shite.
I thought
I can't speak for _everyone_ here, but I suspect that if you took a poll, you'd find that our average tolerance for spam has passed zero and is falling down into the negative numbers. We do think forward, but all we see there is exponential growth of spam unless something devastating is done about it and FAST.
Is unsoclicted direct mail in your regular mailbox "tresspass to chattels" as well?
I would like to say so, but IMU that wood mail box technically belongs to the USPS, or some other such loophole severely restricts my control over it. I'm going to scrounge up a free beer grabage can to put under the mailboxes at my apartment. I bet it'll get a LOT of business.
Too Bad. It's MY mailbox. I'd say that if you'll mark it "ADV:" or something equally easy to filter, that may mitigate your crime to the point where I might not advocate keelhauling as a penalty, but OTOH my ISP would then be faced with filtering the million "legitimate" ADV: spams that he'd receive every day for me, and I know he won't be able to do that for free.
Any attmept to prohobit [any and all advertising of any kind, not limited to spam] sets a dangerous anti-capitalistic precedent....
I'm sorry, but while I'm generally in favor of capitalism, I consider advertizing to be one of its more sinister excesses, especially when it's carried to such an extent that I can't open my eyes anymore without having to look at someone's commercial. I'd VERY much like to see an experiment in which ALL advertizing is banned, for, say, a year. Your claim is that, without advertizing, capitalism would fail, and I simply do not believe that that would happen. I think all consumers would be happier without the megaphone constantly blaring into their ear, and business would go on regardless. Except, I guess, the advertizing business, oh well. I'll remind everyone that the buggy-whip business pretty much took it in the shorts when automobiles were introduced, and no one (outside the buggy-whip industry) considered it to be any huge loss.
Being a businessman and an advertiser, you're suffering under the delusion that, because you have a message which is important to _you_ and which you want very much for me to see, that _I_ must therefore want to see it. I DO NOT. You're suffering under the delusion that you have some kind of "right" to get your message to me. YOU DO NOT. To the extent that advertizing interferes with my life (and this extent increases daily) you have NO right to my time. It's MY life. They're MY eyes, and I have the right to choose to NOT want to see it.
You (or any other advertizer) are NOT building "brand recognition", "positive consumer attitide", or any other kind of good public relations by intruding into our lives. All you're building is resentment and animosity. GO AWAY.
what do they really expect to happen this company?
Do they want their domain revoked, a reprimand, a fine?
Read the discussion. Ameritech Tech stated that he'll stop at nothing short of receiving a "Page Unavailable" error at the spammer's URL.
I find this fair. Spam us (particularly our anti-spam forum!), get kicked off - ALL THE WAY OFF - the Internet.
I'm not alone in this opinion.
Go read news.admin.net-abuse.email for a couple of days.
And we will keep returning the _same_ answer, which you in your marketing frenzy are unable to comprehend.
I own a small IT business,
Good for you.
and I occaisonally send out 20 mails or so to people whom I don't know but who I think may be interested in my services
EAT SHIT AND DIE, SPAMMER!
Is this spam?
Did your victims solicit, request, or otherwise authorize these communications? I suspect NOT, since you state that you do not know them. This makes your communications spam regardless of your intentions, your business, your desire to communicate, your "First Ammendment Right To Free Speech(tm)" or any other delusions you may subscribe to. Spam is trespass on chattels. MY mailbox. MY property. The concept that this is wrong and punishable dates back hundreds of years.
If so, how about 1
If unsolicited, it's still spam.
where does legitimate marketing end and spam begin?
"Advertising" ends at my property, where it becomes tresspass and my right to use force to stop it begins. There is no such thing as "legitimate marketing", that's a fantasy the advertising industry is trying to get you to buy. GET IT ALL OUT OF MY SIGHT!
but _always_ time to do it over.
You are the one with the misconceptions.
You must be too young to have read The Purple Book . The entire IBM-PC is defined there, there's even a schematic for the power supply, and an assembler listing of the BIOS source code. NONE of it needed to be reverse-engineered.
A big question in the early days of the PC was: "Well, just how _closely_ is IBM gonna permit people to build to this spec?"
It turned out that IBM made no attempt to protect _any_part_ of what came to be known as the "ISA" other than their ROM BIOS. When Compaq copied _that_, they sued. Compaq hastily contracted with Phoenix Software to come up with a non-infringing 'clean-room' BIOS, which facilitated a settlement, about the same month that they would have been crushed without it. With it, they were able to continue down the road to becoming the dominant suplier of electrical clones.
With the legal question of "Just exactly _how_ 'open' is this machine?" answered, the clone floodgates were opened.
The rest of your statement is about as befuddled. The reason 32-bit protected mode OSsen took a while to come around was because 32-bit protected mode hardware wasn't available until the 80386 was released.
.......So now you know one person anyway.
And another.