"Such situation is quite common in countries without strong copyright law or its proper enforcement."
Agreed. In the country where my family is from, which is a South American nation btw, whatever movies are currently showing in Canadian and American cinemas are available there in the rental stores for the equivalent of US$0.40. Typically when you watch them you see text scrolling across the bottom every now and then: "If you have rented this movie, please call our piracy hotline at 1-800-###-####" but of course nobody in the country every phones it.
"As long as we are on that track, the Internet was designed to withstand nuclear attack, so its obviously the best choice: archive, encrypt and have others mirror your data."
Just encode your data into a pr0n video and share it on gnutella. That data will never be 'lost' !
Tape may be inconvenient but it is still a true backup medium. With hard drives, the reading and writing hardware are enclosed with the platters. So when the read head of the HDD fails, your data may be 100% intact on the platters but you can't get at it without professional help. How many other parts in the HDD could fail without harming the platters? A lot!
With tape, the failure of a tape drive doesn't separate your from your data (unless it catches on fire with the tape in it or something.) You can just get a new tape drive and you are good to go again.
Thus, tapes are very good because the storage medium and the read/write hardware are separated and not interdependent.
Please don't flame me for quoting Steve Gibson, but I think he's right on this account: "There are only two kinds of hard drives -- Those that have failed and those that will fail."
"It's more like we want our own copies, and we want the best available. As soon as the legal DVD packages come out, you can be sure we'll buy them, silly bookends and all. This goes beyond simply acknowledging copyrights, to acknowledging deep respect both for the written work and for the excellent production. However, there's that waiting thing."
Exactly! And if all media, be it movies, music, etc was produced at such an excellent level nad available instantly, there would be no need for copyright law at all.
And I'd just like to point out that you can get The Fellowship extended edition (4 discs) without the silly bookends as well and save yourself a few bucks. I got it for CAD$40 at HMV last week.
"But the (IMO) most egregious wrong that they committed in their march toward banality was that they stopped airing the BBC comedy The Goon Show (a classic radio comedy and much of the inspiration for Monty Python), which had been playing on their station for as long as I can remember. For that I will never forgive them. The Goons are yet another victim of the march toward radio banality."
I only started listening to this station recently so I did not experience the loss of "The Good Show" at all. Thanks for the correction on the link, btw. I still listen to "A Prairie Home Companion" now and then.
But hey, I like the station. I guess it works for me so I'll listen to it. I understand what you mean but I guess I'm just too young to know how it was in the old days.
"The trading of music over the Net has greatly increased the different types of music that a person listens too. To bad the RIAA doesnt trust the studies that say this is true."
They have realised this but are scared silly about it because they don't control the filesharing networks' distribution methods, and thus aren't in charge of how much money they will make.
The RIAA would rather have no music industry as opposed to a music industry where they don't control their own profits.
"On the other hand, if I didn't download music I'd just be listening to the radio with its horrid commercials."
I agree that typical radio stations tend to have very unsavoury commercials in large amounts. It might be worth checking out 'community' radio stations in your area. I listen to jazz fm broadcast from Toronto a lot (also available on webcast) and since they're a non-commercial radio station as defined by the CRTC, there's only something like 6 minutes per hour of ads. I *have* bought CDs based on what I heard on this station.
Do any similar 'non-commercial' radio station designations exist in the USA?
"You are telling me that you got "I love you" through hotmail? Give me a break. As buggy and easy to break as IE is and as much code as IE and Outlook share, I never heard of anything bad hapening through hotmail or Yahoo accounts."
I still get plenty of klez in my netscape webmail. The goner worm got in this way, although I don't know what webmail provider the guy was using.
"Worse than that, blocking access to Yahoo will break your employee's access to some of their owner's groups. You know, that impartial third party publishing kind of thing that folks at different companies use to share experience and knowledge that benifits all?"
Well they wern't my employees so to speak. I'm just a low ranking peon coder still working toward a degree;-) But as to sharing knowledge with people from other companies so as to get the benefit of outside knowledge... well let's say that this company was a special case. It was definitely a monopoly (this was not a software or electronics company btw) and due to geographical reasons, the only company of its type on the continent, if not in the world. There were no other companies to share knowledge with. Overall, sharing information was a big no-no especially at the time I was working there for reasons that are... well... sharing was a no-no so I can't tell you;-)
"Congratulations on decreasing your rate of virus infection. You might have done better by installing Mozilla and making that your default browser. Is there any bogus policy on that one?"
I wish they would have had the sense to do that. Although I love mozilla, I would still recommend Opera.
" I just don't get why some big companies insist on the bug farm that is Outlook."
Because the management doesn't know any better, and more importantly, they don't want to be told any better.
"A related question to spam: How is it that after I create a hotmail account, within one day, I can be getting spam?
Does hotmail sell lists?"
I wouldn't put it past them.
"Or are there people and bots that just put together random strings of possible user names?"
For sure. There are enough usernames on hotmail to make it worthwhile.
"Does hotmail try to filter these"
Unlikely. This spam makes you more likely to either leave or pay for a bigger inbox so your messages are not auto-deleted to make room for more spam. Either way, MSFT makes money.
"My company's spam filtering software seems to not be able to recognize the fact the email with the following words in the subject Enlarger You Penis are spam. It does seem to tag internal mass postings from the HR dept. as spam though."
Damn, a 50% kill rate is not good enough to qualify your spam filtering as competent! Blame your IT people!
"The only external emails I signed up for are vendors and a couple mailing lists. I suspect "Netop" sold thier email list, that was the last newsletter I opted in. But how do you prove it?"
Prove it using sneakemail. It's too late for you to do anything about netop now, but using sneakemail can save you a lot of aggravation since you set up an e-mail address PER mailing list. If you get spam at one of them, you know who sold your address.
Also, don't use your real e-mail address for anything related to comdex!!!!! You will drown under the spam.
"Virus infections in the past year? 0 workstations, 0 servers. Number of spams/day before companywide? Averaged about 800 for 25 users. Now? About 20 for 25 users."
One more element that is necessary for big companies (not necessarily your 25 user network) is to block off hotmail, yahoo mail, etc. The company I used to work at had more than one thousand people on the corporate network and most of them weren't very smart about how to be safe when using computers. (And because of corporate policy we were forced to use Outlook + MSIE, which is not exactly safe either.)
When your network gets sufficiently big, you WILL have lamers that will infect the whole place from infections they got through hotmail. It doesn't matter how good your filtering is in that case.
When the corporate IT people finally closed off the popular webmail providers, we went from one unleashed virus every 2 weeks to one every 4 months.
... polititians are elected based on advertising that is payed for by corporate contributions and then act based on who payed them a lot of money?
I can only come to one conclusion: The ballot is definitely stronger than the bullet, but in today's United States of America, the Dollar is stronger than the ballot.
"The need for food seems to have disappeared. I beat BG recently and only had to feed my party once. I guess the Exult developers thought that the food system was a bad idea and just didn't implement it fully. In my book, not having to deal with Shamino whining "I must have food" every 2 minutes is a plus."
But this means that only the players who played the original DOS version will be able to see the antics that happen when the party gets really, REALLY hungry;-) (The members randomly start saying Moo, Oink, etc... It's all the funnier when you see it in that old english type font they use.)
"This isn't a troll, but what exactly is the niche?"
The niche is CPU Power per space area. If you go read the NVidia and ATI interviews that were linked to from slashdot a while back, (I think they were fron AnandTech) you will read a part where they talk about how NVidia loves those U2 racks because they provide amazing horsepower per space numbers.
Aha, here's the link! Look at the bottom of the page to read about performance density.
When you are doing huge computational feats, the cost of renting an extra warehouse or two to hold the computers is a cost that should ideally be avoided.
"This idea has a lot of merit, and realistically, most of us here on/. have had addresses for so long that they're on darn near every spam list anyway."
I've had my main address for 2.5 years and only get about 4 spams per year to it. (And it's always the same spam about skin lotion too...) That's a testament to good management and spamblocking of it from the start. It is impossible to find my real address anywhere where a bot can get to it.
But I know what you mean. Most people didn't know how to protect an e-mail address when they first got it. Fortunately for me I had a hotmail address to screw up and learn about anti-spam with before I got a real pop3.
Overall, I agree with you on the point that poisoning the water hole is the best thing to do right now because there is no national legislation in the USA with teeth (and I think there won't be at least until Dubyah is gone) so we have to fend for ourselves. We are essentially on the frontier. We're 'gunslingers' in the wild west and only those who are smartest and have the fastest, most accurate gun will live to tell about it. Yes, poison the spammers' air supply for the good of everyone.
"This is a good idea, and I've done it myself on a couple occasions."
I have done it to some Nigerian scammers. I got them to phone the US Secret Service Electronic Crimes department and ask for James Kirk. One guy was furious and demanded an apology. Another e-mailed me back and said the woman told me there was no James Kirk there. (Yes, the James Kirk name is from the haxial.org escapades.)
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. In the country where my family is from, which is a South American nation btw, whatever movies are currently showing in Canadian and American cinemas are available there in the rental stores for the equivalent of US$0.40. Typically when you watch them you see text scrolling across the bottom every now and then: "If you have rented this movie, please call our piracy hotline at 1-800-###-####" but of course nobody in the country every phones it.
Just encode your data into a pr0n video and share it on gnutella. That data will never be 'lost' !
With tape, the failure of a tape drive doesn't separate your from your data (unless it catches on fire with the tape in it or something.) You can just get a new tape drive and you are good to go again.
Thus, tapes are very good because the storage medium and the read/write hardware are separated and not interdependent.
This is proof that we need a +1, Troll moderation.
Hard drives are not non-volatile storage.
Exactly! And if all media, be it movies, music, etc was produced at such an excellent level nad available instantly, there would be no need for copyright law at all.
And I'd just like to point out that you can get The Fellowship extended edition (4 discs) without the silly bookends as well and save yourself a few bucks. I got it for CAD$40 at HMV last week.
I've seen various permutations of this idea thrown around on slashdot before.
I only started listening to this station recently so I did not experience the loss of "The Good Show" at all. Thanks for the correction on the link, btw. I still listen to "A Prairie Home Companion" now and then.
But hey, I like the station. I guess it works for me so I'll listen to it. I understand what you mean but I guess I'm just too young to know how it was in the old days.
WTF? I was sure the original link was right. I even tested it.
But no, it was not meant to go to jazz.ca. It supposed to point to http://www.jazz.fm/.
Thanks for pointing it out.
They have realised this but are scared silly about it because they don't control the filesharing networks' distribution methods, and thus aren't in charge of how much money they will make.
The RIAA would rather have no music industry as opposed to a music industry where they don't control their own profits.
I agree that typical radio stations tend to have very unsavoury commercials in large amounts. It might be worth checking out 'community' radio stations in your area. I listen to jazz fm broadcast from Toronto a lot (also available on webcast) and since they're a non-commercial radio station as defined by the CRTC, there's only something like 6 minutes per hour of ads. I *have* bought CDs based on what I heard on this station.
Do any similar 'non-commercial' radio station designations exist in the USA?
I still get plenty of klez in my netscape webmail. The goner worm got in this way, although I don't know what webmail provider the guy was using.
"Worse than that, blocking access to Yahoo will break your employee's access to some of their owner's groups. You know, that impartial third party publishing kind of thing that folks at different companies use to share experience and knowledge that benifits all?"
Well they wern't my employees so to speak. I'm just a low ranking peon coder still working toward a degree ;-) But as to sharing knowledge with people from other companies so as to get the benefit of outside knowledge ... well let's say that this company was a special case. It was definitely a monopoly (this was not a software or electronics company btw) and due to geographical reasons, the only company of its type on the continent, if not in the world. There were no other companies to share knowledge with. Overall, sharing information was a big no-no especially at the time I was working there for reasons that are ... well ... sharing was a no-no so I can't tell you ;-)
"Congratulations on decreasing your rate of virus infection. You might have done better by installing Mozilla and making that your default browser. Is there any bogus policy on that one?"
I wish they would have had the sense to do that. Although I love mozilla, I would still recommend Opera.
" I just don't get why some big companies insist on the bug farm that is Outlook."
Because the management doesn't know any better, and more importantly, they don't want to be told any better.
Does hotmail sell lists?"
I wouldn't put it past them.
"Or are there people and bots that just put together random strings of possible user names?"
For sure. There are enough usernames on hotmail to make it worthwhile.
"Does hotmail try to filter these"
Unlikely. This spam makes you more likely to either leave or pay for a bigger inbox so your messages are not auto-deleted to make room for more spam. Either way, MSFT makes money.
Damn, a 50% kill rate is not good enough to qualify your spam filtering as competent! Blame your IT people!
Prove it using sneakemail. It's too late for you to do anything about netop now, but using sneakemail can save you a lot of aggravation since you set up an e-mail address PER mailing list. If you get spam at one of them, you know who sold your address.
Also, don't use your real e-mail address for anything related to comdex!!!!! You will drown under the spam.
One more element that is necessary for big companies (not necessarily your 25 user network) is to block off hotmail, yahoo mail, etc. The company I used to work at had more than one thousand people on the corporate network and most of them weren't very smart about how to be safe when using computers. (And because of corporate policy we were forced to use Outlook + MSIE, which is not exactly safe either.)
When your network gets sufficiently big, you WILL have lamers that will infect the whole place from infections they got through hotmail. It doesn't matter how good your filtering is in that case.
When the corporate IT people finally closed off the popular webmail providers, we went from one unleashed virus every 2 weeks to one every 4 months.
Clearly, you have never owned a boar hog ;-)
I can only come to one conclusion: The ballot is definitely stronger than the bullet, but in today's United States of America, the Dollar is stronger than the ballot.
But this means that only the players who played the original DOS version will be able to see the antics that happen when the party gets really, REALLY hungry ;-) (The members randomly start saying Moo, Oink, etc... It's all the funnier when you see it in that old english type font they use.)
The niche is CPU Power per space area. If you go read the NVidia and ATI interviews that were linked to from slashdot a while back, (I think they were fron AnandTech) you will read a part where they talk about how NVidia loves those U2 racks because they provide amazing horsepower per space numbers.
Aha, here's the link! Look at the bottom of the page to read about performance density.
When you are doing huge computational feats, the cost of renting an extra warehouse or two to hold the computers is a cost that should ideally be avoided.
That's what the USB and Firewire are for.
Seriously, I think this was designed more for server and rackmount applications so the ethernet would be more important.
Yes, that unfortunately applies to me too.
I've had my main address for 2.5 years and only get about 4 spams per year to it. (And it's always the same spam about skin lotion too...) That's a testament to good management and spamblocking of it from the start. It is impossible to find my real address anywhere where a bot can get to it.
But I know what you mean. Most people didn't know how to protect an e-mail address when they first got it. Fortunately for me I had a hotmail address to screw up and learn about anti-spam with before I got a real pop3.
Overall, I agree with you on the point that poisoning the water hole is the best thing to do right now because there is no national legislation in the USA with teeth (and I think there won't be at least until Dubyah is gone) so we have to fend for ourselves. We are essentially on the frontier. We're 'gunslingers' in the wild west and only those who are smartest and have the fastest, most accurate gun will live to tell about it. Yes, poison the spammers' air supply for the good of everyone.
I have done it to some Nigerian scammers. I got them to phone the US Secret Service Electronic Crimes department and ask for James Kirk. One guy was furious and demanded an apology. Another e-mailed me back and said the woman told me there was no James Kirk there. (Yes, the James Kirk name is from the haxial.org escapades.)
IANAL
Because that would be easier to prosecute.