"Own your own domain.
Have your e-mail setup to forward *@yourdomain.com to your actual e-mail address.
Never give anyone your e-mail address. Give everybody different e-mail addresses to e-mail you at. Your friend jenny can e-mail you at jenny@yourdomain or whatever she'd like.
When you sign up for something, use an e-mail address like theirproduct@yourdomain or theirdomain.com@yourdomain."
This is almost exactly what I do. (I put the sneakemail into my plan above as opposed to owning the domain because sneakemail can be $free, so the plan is accessible to more people.) But yes, I certainly use different referrers for different services, but for just conversing with people it's too bothersome to use a different alias for every single one. You have to remember to use the appropriate 'from' address with every e-mail. This is why I use a 'general' return-address for this case.
"How many people do you know that use Outlook and may have your email in their address book? The bitch of the matter?"
There is an easy defence against this:
Let's say your real address is your.name@yourISP.com. Tou need to first set up a sneakemail address. Use this address as the 'from' address in your e-mails. Then set up your 'name' as "Your Name [your.name-at-yourISP-dot-com]." This way, the sneakemail address (which can be changed whenever spam comes in) will appear in lusers' outlook address books, and clueful people will just copy the real address from the 'Name' field.
"Products at discount prices, delivered direct to your door. That can mean "Generic Viagra" if you want, but also everything from books to airplanes, the mundane to the exotic."
I'd like to expand on this point about being able to get exotic things online. One of the great things about the net IMO is that the 'population' is so large that niche cultures become economically significant.
The perfect example of this I keep seeing is the non-asian market for japanese anime products. In the past, the market was so fragmented, only in large population centres could you get the stuff you want, and then sometimes for insane prices. If you lived in a less populous area, the local stores wouldn't stock anything because the market is so small it takes forever to move the products and when buying such quantities, the price is driven up quite a bit.
But all of the small factions of many niche groups are brought together on the 'net so their buying power becomes significant. There are now plenty of sites where you can get a very wide variety of anime products for decent prices. They can stock a lot of them and thus offer decent prices because the community is big enough.
So basically I'm saying that the internet is important because it allows niche interests to reach critical mass.
"The internet is quick, you can learn about anything at the click of a button, you dont have to spend hours at the library looking through books,"
Exactly. The best analogy I can come up with for this is that the internet allows information which was previously 'liquid' to become 'gaseous' so it expands effortlessly and is practically impossible to contain. (Information went from solid to liquid with the invention of the printing press.)
"So what DOES the internet have to offer me? It doesn't cook me dinner, take out the trash, or even clean up its room."
It offers you a method to bypass bureaucracy and human limits: On sunday night / monday morning at 1 AM I got a fresh copy of the forms for the "Application for a Permanent Resident Card" for a friend who got into a jam whole visiting China who desperately needed it without having to go to Canada Customs and Immigration during business hours.
The only thing I can say here is that Verisign seems to be in competiton with SCO for numerous titles:
- most hated company on the internet - most stupid business moves - most obvious 'shoot self in foot' maneuvre
I expect that slashdot would implode if SCO sued Verisign for this maneuvre. Do you cheer because one of them will lose? Or groan because one will win?
"Get a used Model M Keyboard [modelm.org]. They're built like tanks, and make an extremely satisfying "clickity clackity clackity clickity" sound thanks to those spring-loaded keys."
I've gotta agree with you. The Model M I am typing on right now is almost 20 years old and the only problem I ever have with it is that the numpad plus key occasionally sticks.
There's no #(*%^&*(#ing windows key. Just the essentials. And the blackslash is in the right place, the main enter key is not oversized, and the backspace is as big as it's supposed to be.
"if you see the word "drive" in it its 1000 as in hard DRIVE and usb DRIVE, if you don't its 1024:P:P:P"
That's an interesting soft 'rule' but I would hesitate to consider it a 'law of storage' or tell that to any client or non-technical person because when the next storage technology comes out, it might be called a 'drive' but use 1024 MB as a GB. It applies right now, but there's no knowing when it will no longer be valid.
"You'd be surprised: all the writable DVDs I have claim 4.7GB but offer 4,700,000,000 (+/- a tiny amount) bytes = 4.3*2^30. (CDs, on the other hand, do use 1024: the "700MB" CDs I use are 736,966,656 (data) bytes = 703*2^20."
I stand corrected. I don't have a DVD burner so I assumed that DVD-Rs were the same as CD-Rs in this respect. It just goes to show how confusing the market is;-)
I expect that this is really confusing for the typical customer. These are the observations I generally accept as true:
1. For hard drives, the industry defines 1000 MB = 1 GB
2. For RAM, the industry defines 1024 MB = 1 GB
3. For mp3 players, it depends
4. For CD-R, DVD-R/w, the industry defines 1024 MB = 1 GB
5. For USB flash drives, the industry defines 1000 MB = 1 GB.
Unless you are very used to dealing with these markets, they can be hellishly difficult to understand.
"I know that they've been spamming me, using my e-mail address harvested from SlashDot. (I use slashdot@...)"
I have experimented with putting freshly created e-mail addresses to show up with my slashdot comments, and typically within 12 hours I start getting spam at them. It never seems to happen to the ones that are 'anti-spam-armoured' though which suggests that there's still an ample supply of raw e-mail addresses out there to be harvested by HTTP.
"The only way I can make mine seem to get too hot is if I plug it in and leaving it running something like say... itunes visualizations all day, with no air flowing over it, and no hands running over it."
Obviously you don't use bittorrent;-)
One time I ran bittorrent for 2 weeks straight on my iBook and MAN, it was hot. I don't want to imagine how hot a PB12" would have gotten!
"True, but the government recently ran all that fiber optic cable along the Canadian National Railway line (CNR), and now alot of small, interior communities have bandwidth that would make an urbanite jealous.
There has a been a huge push to get high-speed Internet to small, rural communites."
Well I hope they get to my town soon: I live in rural Ontario and still only get 28.8 dialup. Nothing else is available.
ONTARIANS/QUEBECERS!!! LISTEN UP!! If there is no DSL where you live and you want to get it, then you have to phone up Bell Canada and specifically request the service. (Once they install the hardware, any ISP can provide it.) They will take your name, address, phone#, etc. This information is what's used to determine where the service is expanded next. Just entering your number into bell's form to check availablility all the time has no effect. We all have to do this to signal the demand.
(FYI I did type 'Quebecers' with the accent but slashcode stripped it.)
"file sharing isn't a crime, though - it's a civil offense for which the RIAA sues your butt off..."
Yeah but they were able to buy the DMCA. Who knows what else they might have up their sleeve? IMO Pax Americana is over and in the next 30 years there will be a major shift in power across the planet, and I don't mean to Canada either.
"Will Canada border-hopping now include underage drinking and underage stealing? You decide."
Canada != Cuba. There is an extradition treaty between the USA and Canada so if you commit a crime in the USA and then run across the border you could still legally be extradited.
" So d__s t__s m__n t__t we d_n't n__d t_e m____e l____s at all?"
No, the middle letters are still necessary. I find myself misreading all the time because my brain took in the first and last letter and read it as a word with similar spelling and length.
So I would hypothesize that the first/last letters along with the lengths of the words and a rough idea of what letters go in the middle are what our brains look for.
But this only comes with practice. English is my first language and I have read millions and millions of words in English in my lifetime so I am very used to taking in written information this way. But if I switch to reading something in French (for which I took for 11 years in school but never became fluent, mainly because I hated learning french) I still have to read each word carefully because I am not used to reading it.
So if some person who is just learning english looked at words with jumbled internals, I expect that they would have a terrible time trying to figure them out. Their brains have not read each word thousands of times so they still have to decode them letter by letter.
"that's nonsense. Wait until the day we have gigabit ethernet in every home and we can copy an entire DVD in "
I think it's more about good last mile solutions about getting GigE in every home. I can copy an entire raw DVDRip across 100 Mb ethernet in under 15 minutes assuming I'm using a very efficient FTP server. (The one built into OS X comes to mind.) If internet service became fast enough to saturate 100 Mb connections, that would be enough to open the floodgates on napster-scale DVD-trading.
"Once, I kept a lady on the phone for like an hour, talking about magazines. I was gonna order the whole lot. Then she says, "Okay, I need your credit card to continue." I calmly reply, "Credit Card? Oh no no no. That's how they get ya. I keep all my money in a box under my bed.""
One time, I received a call from a marketing firm hired by my bank (so yes, there was a prior business relationship) asking about the AOL disc they sent me. They wanted to know if I remembered receiving it, what I thought of the service, etc. (Obviously the disc didn't make it anywhere near my CD drive.)
So when she asked me what I ended up doing with the disc, I told her the truth: "I cut it up and added it to my AOL CD moasic collection." She was caught off guard by that one, but repeated it word for word as she entered it into the DB.
Even today, the thing is pasted up artistically on the front of my wardrobe. I would have liked to see the marketing manager's reaction when they came across that entry.
Slashdot Mirror
This is almost exactly what I do. (I put the sneakemail into my plan above as opposed to owning the domain because sneakemail can be $free, so the plan is accessible to more people.) But yes, I certainly use different referrers for different services, but for just conversing with people it's too bothersome to use a different alias for every single one. You have to remember to use the appropriate 'from' address with every e-mail. This is why I use a 'general' return-address for this case.
There is an easy defence against this:
Let's say your real address is your.name@yourISP.com. Tou need to first set up a sneakemail address. Use this address as the 'from' address in your e-mails. Then set up your 'name' as "Your Name [your.name-at-yourISP-dot-com]." This way, the sneakemail address (which can be changed whenever spam comes in) will appear in lusers' outlook address books, and clueful people will just copy the real address from the 'Name' field.
I'd like to expand on this point about being able to get exotic things online. One of the great things about the net IMO is that the 'population' is so large that niche cultures become economically significant.
The perfect example of this I keep seeing is the non-asian market for japanese anime products. In the past, the market was so fragmented, only in large population centres could you get the stuff you want, and then sometimes for insane prices. If you lived in a less populous area, the local stores wouldn't stock anything because the market is so small it takes forever to move the products and when buying such quantities, the price is driven up quite a bit.
But all of the small factions of many niche groups are brought together on the 'net so their buying power becomes significant. There are now plenty of sites where you can get a very wide variety of anime products for decent prices. They can stock a lot of them and thus offer decent prices because the community is big enough.
So basically I'm saying that the internet is important because it allows niche interests to reach critical mass.
Exactly. The best analogy I can come up with for this is that the internet allows information which was previously 'liquid' to become 'gaseous' so it expands effortlessly and is practically impossible to contain. (Information went from solid to liquid with the invention of the printing press.)
It offers you a method to bypass bureaucracy and human limits: On sunday night / monday morning at 1 AM I got a fresh copy of the forms for the "Application for a Permanent Resident Card" for a friend who got into a jam whole visiting China who desperately needed it without having to go to Canada Customs and Immigration during business hours.
"Sometimes I wonder why people describe Slashdot as the most intelligent community on the 'net."
Knowledgable != intelligent
The only thing I can say here is that Verisign seems to be in competiton with SCO for numerous titles:
- most hated company on the internet
- most stupid business moves
- most obvious 'shoot self in foot' maneuvre
I expect that slashdot would implode if SCO sued Verisign for this maneuvre. Do you cheer because one of them will lose? Or groan because one will win?
"The domain you are looking for does not exist. perhaps you have miss-typed the url."
It's followed by a google box and some links to the ISPs pages.
I've gotta agree with you. The Model M I am typing on right now is almost 20 years old and the only problem I ever have with it is that the numpad plus key occasionally sticks.
There's no #(*%^&*(#ing windows key. Just the essentials. And the blackslash is in the right place, the main enter key is not oversized, and the backspace is as big as it's supposed to be.
That's an interesting soft 'rule' but I would hesitate to consider it a 'law of storage' or tell that to any client or non-technical person because when the next storage technology comes out, it might be called a 'drive' but use 1024 MB as a GB. It applies right now, but there's no knowing when it will no longer be valid.
I stand corrected. (I don't own a DVD writer.) Just goes to show how confusing the market it ;-)
I stand corrected. I don't have a DVD burner so I assumed that DVD-Rs were the same as CD-Rs in this respect. It just goes to show how confusing the market is ;-)
1. For hard drives, the industry defines 1000 MB = 1 GB
2. For RAM, the industry defines 1024 MB = 1 GB
3. For mp3 players, it depends
4. For CD-R, DVD-R/w, the industry defines 1024 MB = 1 GB
5. For USB flash drives, the industry defines 1000 MB = 1 GB.
Unless you are very used to dealing with these markets, they can be hellishly difficult to understand.
I have experimented with putting freshly created e-mail addresses to show up with my slashdot comments, and typically within 12 hours I start getting spam at them. It never seems to happen to the ones that are 'anti-spam-armoured' though which suggests that there's still an ample supply of raw e-mail addresses out there to be harvested by HTTP.
Obviously you don't use bittorrent ;-)
One time I ran bittorrent for 2 weeks straight on my iBook and MAN, it was hot. I don't want to imagine how hot a PB12" would have gotten!
Well I hope they get to my town soon: I live in rural Ontario and still only get 28.8 dialup. Nothing else is available.
ONTARIANS/QUEBECERS!!! LISTEN UP!! If there is no DSL where you live and you want to get it, then you have to phone up Bell Canada and specifically request the service. (Once they install the hardware, any ISP can provide it.) They will take your name, address, phone#, etc. This information is what's used to determine where the service is expanded next. Just entering your number into bell's form to check availablility all the time has no effect. We all have to do this to signal the demand.
(FYI I did type 'Quebecers' with the accent but slashcode stripped it.)
Yeah but they were able to buy the DMCA. Who knows what else they might have up their sleeve? IMO Pax Americana is over and in the next 30 years there will be a major shift in power across the planet, and I don't mean to Canada either.
And the last letter of MPAA stands for "America" but try telling that to Jon Johansen.
Canada != Cuba. There is an extradition treaty between the USA and Canada so if you commit a crime in the USA and then run across the border you could still legally be extradited.
Wait a sec, I am Canadian. Never mind.
So this explains how 'music' groups like the BLackstreet Boys came into existence.
No, the middle letters are still necessary. I find myself misreading all the time because my brain took in the first and last letter and read it as a word with similar spelling and length.
So I would hypothesize that the first/last letters along with the lengths of the words and a rough idea of what letters go in the middle are what our brains look for.
But this only comes with practice. English is my first language and I have read millions and millions of words in English in my lifetime so I am very used to taking in written information this way. But if I switch to reading something in French (for which I took for 11 years in school but never became fluent, mainly because I hated learning french) I still have to read each word carefully because I am not used to reading it.
So if some person who is just learning english looked at words with jumbled internals, I expect that they would have a terrible time trying to figure them out. Their brains have not read each word thousands of times so they still have to decode them letter by letter.
I think it's more about good last mile solutions about getting GigE in every home. I can copy an entire raw DVDRip across 100 Mb ethernet in under 15 minutes assuming I'm using a very efficient FTP server. (The one built into OS X comes to mind.) If internet service became fast enough to saturate 100 Mb connections, that would be enough to open the floodgates on napster-scale DVD-trading.
One time, I received a call from a marketing firm hired by my bank (so yes, there was a prior business relationship) asking about the AOL disc they sent me. They wanted to know if I remembered receiving it, what I thought of the service, etc. (Obviously the disc didn't make it anywhere near my CD drive.)
So when she asked me what I ended up doing with the disc, I told her the truth: "I cut it up and added it to my AOL CD moasic collection." She was caught off guard by that one, but repeated it word for word as she entered it into the DB.
Even today, the thing is pasted up artistically on the front of my wardrobe. I would have liked to see the marketing manager's reaction when they came across that entry.
That's when you have to phone them back and complain to her manager that the telemarketer rudely hung up on you ;-)