The virus part is fine...but eManager is one of the worst spam products ever invented. No scoring, so mail either goes through or gets blocked without any in-betweens. The out-of-the-box rules must have been written by Jonathan Edwards (for those not up on their history, he was a famous Puritan preacher). There's no HTML cleaning ability; the only way to keep nasty javascripts away is to block javascript (which causes every employee to squawk because they lose all their newsletters). When we use the "auto-update" antispam feature that this article's about, we got a 45% false positive rate. The slightest change (numbers substituted for letters, misspellings, etc) invalidates a setting and lets spam through; it's got to match exactly.
I've used eManager for two years and am working to get rid of it. Hell, even thinking about eManager will probably block your legit mail and let in the spam.
The US Immigration and Naturalization Service (now the BCIS as part of their re-org into Homeland Security) trusts the mail implicitly, unless they're sending you a notice that your application was denied (then they send it certified). A notice to come to a fingerprinting was not sent certified, got lost in the mail (although I have serious doubts on whether it was ever sent in the first place), and resulted in a $110 charge for me to reopen the case. Thanks a lot, guys.
I'm sure that plenty of important mail gets lost because some agency or another was too cheap to use a reliable mail service -- after all, if they send it reliably, it costs them a little extra. If, on the other hand, you lose it, they get a hundred bucks for refiling. No disrespect to the post office intended; it's the fault of the system design. Think of mail like you do UDP: Fast, simple, cheap, and unreliable.
...and it worked for me. I'd never heard of Firebird, the database, before this flamewar. I'd bet that not only had most Slashdotters never heard of it, they'll remember it the next time the name comes up.
Pretty sneaky, if you ask me. Now where did I put that tinfoil hat?
People have rehashed this idea every time a spam discussion comes up. It will block 99.99% of spam at first, but it's annoying to the sender and a waste of time...and it still doesn't guarantee you get the message when you want it.
Let's say Allen sends a message to Bob. He needs the memo by 5:00 today for the big presentation. Bob was stuck in traffic. He sends it at 3:00 and rushes off to another meeting. Maybe he forgot to use the key; maybe it was changed for this month. In any case, the message gets bounced. In this scenario, email now heavily depends on a manual element, one that is irritating and prone to failure.
Might as well poke a few more holes in this: If this plan gets widespread, spammers can find the magic key in your message simply by searching for something that matches a regular expression (some general form of "Please resend this message with yyf6d55s in the subject line.") and looking for nondictionary words. It's as easy to spot a rejection message in this form as it is to spot spam by looking for an opt-out line.
Who needs a set-top box that crashes or a computer that slows down because it's recording today's episode of Friends?
Well, we want one that won't crash. Or slow down. That's why we want a Linux set-top box.;)
The tech exists to hack it together right now; it would be moderately expensive and rather ugly, but it could be done (Linux-supported TV-out + IR input port + LIRC + Linux BIOS or the Linux save-to-disk hack + xine/favorite decoder -- google for all these, I'm too lazy to link). And you can't say "Computers and TVs were not made to mix". The DVD player that might be sitting on your shelf is basically a simplified computer. If it can play MP3s, it is even more so. How about your Sega Dreamcast? We ported Linux to the thing, for God's sake! That can perform all the operations needed to call it a computer under Turing's definition...so you already have computers plugged into your TV, unless you're strictly an antenna-only guy.
Linux already works as an OS for many embedded systems. Your set-top box is merely another such system. I won't even get into the quagmire of a DRM argument, but let it be said for now that there are people who have gotten Linux PVRs working. It can be done now. With work, it can be done much more smoothly later.
The justification would be that the copyright holder is doing society a minor but nontrivial harm by holding on to his work, but that that harm could be offset by the additional revenue to the government. If Disney wants to hold on to the copyright for "Steamboat Willie" forever, they're free to do so if they can cough up the greenbacks.
They do. That's exactly what we're complaining about. They pay a congressman, he puts forth a bill for a longer copyright, and they get a longer copyright.
The idea that a corporation should be able to pay the government to defend itself against the rights of the people is completely ridiculous; in fact, it creates a serious conflict of interest. What's more, at some point it has to be recognized that no amount of greenbacks are worth owning information in perpetuity; personally, I'd rather have "Steamboat Willie" usable by anyone than all the mended highways in the country paid for from Disney's coffers. There are some things you can't put a price tag on. Now, someone think up a good Mastercard-ad joke.;)
Joining the merry throng
on
Science Askew
·
· Score: 5, Funny
A project manager, a hardware engineer, and a programmer were in a car. Coming down a hill, a tyre got a puncture, the car went out of control, and a bad crash was only narrowly averted.
The project manager wanted everyone to help draw up a plan of how to fix the car and carry on.
The hardware engineer wanted to change the tyre and carry on.
The programmer wanted to go back to the top of the hill, drive down again, and see if the problem happened again.
I think this would fall under the "statistics" portion of "lies, damned lies, and statistics". I'd feel a lot less skeptical if:
A. The report was put out by a more impartial group than the Wildlife Conservation Society (that's like an endangerment study put out by a big-game hunting club),
B. they included their method and analysis, and
C. they did not preface their findings by "Scientists say..." which usually is shorthand for, "You're stupid, they're smart, we're quoting them, so believe whatever we tell you."
Is there any further information? How did they arrive at a figure of 83% and four Earths?
Exactly: The Mormon pioneers. Of course they were allowed to settle there; in the eyes of the government, they were moving out to a lifeless desert that the US only had a tenuous claim to (and certainly little force to back it up); the only inhabitants were Indians. Sure, they'd let them have it. It would be like letting a group of utopians to found a colony on Mars.
Times have changed slightly, and the world has gotten smaller. The last great immigration to form a nation was (probably, there may have been another) the Zionist immigration to Israel -- and that has been fiercely contested. Another one will be almost impossible. A Mormon-style emigration is unlikely to occur again, on this planet anyway.
They intend to eventually achieve "political autonomy", that is, to become free of federal law after a time. It sounds like a "peaceful rebellion", like the Southern Secession was supposed to be.
Not one, but a large group of states tried this already: in 1860. They had a lot more people interested than a mere 20,000 or so, an existing infrastructure, a cause supported at least in theory by the majority, a cultural identity, and the best Army officers.
They still lost.
This won't work simply because a vast majority of people who join a movement like this are much more comfortable posting on a website blog, K5, or Slashdot than they are at moving to another state simply because of a website; many are crackpots that can agree with no one. There are no "rebel states" where even a significant minority resent being part of the US; whatever state it may be, the residents will instead resent a huge influx of wild-eyed dissidents. The movement is in the name of "liberty", which sounds good, but is an intentionally vague concept that people have a hard time agreeing on, particularly armchair politicians.
My prediction: It won't get off the ground. It's a project like the American Civil War, and the people who propose this kind of thing are far, far less suited to go through with it than their southern counterparts of 142 years ago.
I don't know if this is still true (the last time I used AOL was about '94), but once you started using the free hours, AOL needed a credit card number. Just in case you, uh, go over the limit. What they didn't tell you is that if you did go over the limit, you wouldn't be notified; they just quietly started billing you. Then it was the devil's own work to try and get them to stop, and especially to get your CC out of their database.
If this is all still the case, using your "free" hours is shooting yourself in the foot.
A. It's not just a man helping someone; it's an organization of activists that has some rather extreme viewpoints, that some of us don't trust. They're asking for our money, so we would do well to examine them carefully.
B. The "needy" in this case can be defined as "friends of Indymedia in another country". We're not helping some starving kid here. I wouldn't give the editors of Indymedia a computer if they wanted one. Why would I want to help them give one to their friends?
C. The feasibility of the project needs to be looked at as well. Does this project make any sense considering the country's electrical grid, laws, politics, and Internet connectivity, or is it just a political gesture? I suspect it's the latter.
Dogma, BTW, is an established viewpoint created to be repeated without scrutiny. What you're seeing here on Slashdot is "skepticism", which is a whole different animal.
This is almost a flame, but I'd say that from the comments I've seen so far, NO ONE has been really affected. The liberal/civil liberties/privacy types say they've been affected, but if you read further down their comments, they'll all say the same thing: "I worry about our government more than I did before". Not "I got jailed for being a member of an Al-Qaida spin-off cell", and not even "my phone is tapped 24/7 because I read Slashdot and use Linux". In short, those American citizens who are saying they are affected by the laws are "comfortably concerned citizens". Although I'm sure some unscrupulous government droid will use these laws to an evil end, no one seems to have been seriously affected yet.
Of course, a paranoid way of looking at things might be that the reason no one has said anything is that the people affected are either trying to keep a low profile or already are in a top-secret federal prison somewhere....
A cult following isn't the answer to everything, but it's still quite a force. After my band, Victim Of Circumstance, won a local "Battle of the Bands" contest, we had some people who knew some of our songs and would come to every concert. If the crowd was a little bit shy, they'd start a moshpit for us. They'd ask us to play at their parties, schools, or churches. People are already trying to get us played on the radio, although it hasn't happened yet except on KBPS Portland (a highschool station).
Successful pop bands tap into a movement, or create one. They make people feel like they belong. There are millions of professional bands under the radar screen because they either are all about business (wedding bands, etc) or do not want the fame, and they never had to pass the "gatekeepers", as you call them. So let me ask you: Are you in it for the music, or are you just trying to become famous? The two are not mutually exclusive, but they almost are. Think of all the bands that people talk of; how many times have you heard, "They used to be cool when they were underground, but now that everyone listens to them they suck." People like feeling like they belong to a small group, too, so that has something to do with it.
If you're trying to become famous, I can't help you, as my band isn't famous. Really, Slashdot is the wrong place to learn about fame. There are famous people in nerd-dom, but the only people who know about them are other nerds.:)
If you want to learn how to get to know a lot of people and play music for them, then get a core of devoted fans and have them plug you every chance they get. Start a mailing list and talk to them directly; find out if any highschool or college fans have ins on a radio station (I can't count the number of times someone's said "Oh, my uncle works for that station"...and high-school and college radio stations are always good targets for new bands). Autograph your CDs after your concerts, and mingle with the crowd before, after, and during. Make them feel like part of the band, not just an audience, and they'll take care of you.
Get together with other bands, too. When Nirvana became big, every record executive in the country went to Seattle to get bands. They got Pearl Jam, STP, and Jane's Addiction. Bands do better, in my opinion, if they know each other and promote each other.
You only need to deal with the RIAA if you want to be famous, be on Clear Channel and MTV. If you DO want to be any of these things, it's still a good idea to take my advice. You can never have too many connections.
Programming the time on a VCR is a bit different. People always use that as an example, but read The Design of Everyday Things for why so many VCRs are hard to program. It's not because the average user is stupid, it's because of horrible design on the part of the manufacturer. The average user (my wife, for example) can easily program a VCR using a simple on-screen menu; it's when the programming involves a few (or too many) buttons, no output, etc that all hell breaks loose.
In addition, one should never cite ignorance as a barrier to convenience. If the thing is felt to be necessary (and "Joe Sixpack" usually considers free music and cheap DVDs necessary) outweighs the lack of knowledge, a user will learn; that's basic psychology. The thousands of people who used to only play Solitaire, but heard they could get free music on the Internet, learned how to use Napster.
As I see it, however, regional encoding will probably stay, even though it sucks, just because Americans aren't going to complain. The average person won't be buying from Japan, since DVDs have been kept at an exceptionally cheap rate; almost cheaper than a CD. Hell, look at Lord of the Rings; they're selling the DVD for $15 at Fry's Electronics. The average DVD sells for about $25. I'm expecting any day to get DVDs free in boxes of cereal...and to throw them away!
Under this scheme, Europe gets shafted worst; it pays the highest and often gets a censored copy. The Asian countries barely even use DVD...maybe Japan (no experience here), but certainly not anything south of that; that's what VCDs are for. So I see no public outcry building.
This gentleman is a troll...every point he brings up is self-contradicting. The people who say "More power to him! America sucks!" and those who say "That bastard! What an idiot!" are probably both being snickered at because they're taking it so seriously.
Frankly, it's hard for me to believe someone could unintentionally be that stupid, or that wrong, in an article. Consider that his "two beliefs we have to drop" are the same, most of his evidence is just plain false, and his language is all inflammatory. I see 300 comments, most of them furious, so I figure his troll succeeded.
That said, I think it's kind of stupid that the Register would put something like that up even as a satire or a joke; it's not April Fools and I like to read pertinant, useful news there (not to mention the BOFH:) ). It's as if they posted a goatsex link or a "BSD is dying" article.
Ah...but can you use the Internet while sitting on the toilet?
Of course, you can, but you need a wireless connection, mobile hardware, batteries...and you're doing it in a rather disgusting environment, around water. Do you really want your laptop/palm/subnotebook around that? And if a fly comes buzzing by or the dog climbs on your sofa...I assure you, a newspaper works a LOT better.;)
Returning to the "newspaper in the bathroom" scenario, in my office we have a lot of people who kindly leave the Sports section, the comics, or other bits of their newspaper in the bathroom stalls. So when the next gentleman comes in, he too can entertain himself on the crapper. All for $0.75....which is a price that beats any Internet connection's, let alone that of the hardware that you need for it. Plus, it's a great way of "file-sharing" without some corporation's lawyers prosecuting you for violating the DMCA.
Sure, I can read more news on the Internet, and quicker, at my desk...but there are some situations in which it's really handy to have a good old-fashioned newspaper around.
At the government agency where I work, we get thousands of spam messages a day from slimeballs all over the world. Why? Well, another agency posted all our email addresses to the web once, people in the agency are clueless and "punch the monkey", etc. The usual reasons. We installed an anti-spam program from Trend (e-Manager), but it's a string-search program.
Note to newbies at server-based spam-blocking: String-search programs suck. Half the time I got false positives and had users parading outside my cube with pitchforks and torches. The other half of the time it was false negatives and the user received the spam...and then sent it to us. ALL the time, I was updating the list of banned phrases, which is essentially "shutting the barn door behind the horse".
Recently, I've been testing DCC. It operates on checksums, kind of a "word-of-mouth" approach to spam. The theory is that if you have enough DCC servers, keeping a count of the message checksums, then you can block it based on its "bulkiness". I tested my inbox on a CGI demo of it that they have on their server, and it had a 100% accuracy rate.
I'm not going to go into it much further, since you can read the docs, but this is the first day of the test, and so far, I've got a couple thousand hits; 90% of it is spam (I'm updating my whitelist as I write this). There are a couple programs like it (I heard on the Register that they're putting out one like it using a P2P client model), but I think the future of spam-busting is in this.
Gazing at the lewd/fraudulent/ridiculous subject lines cropping up in my DCC logfile, I realize: If the Internet had a body, this part would be the ass. Seeing all of it makes you almost despair for humanity....except for the fact that DCC caught it, and you know people won't have to look at it.;)
As far as I can see, the more admins get involved in this, the harder it becomes for spam to propagate...and there are a dozen other tricks you can do to cut it down. So what are you waiting for? Join in the fun. There are some problems with this method (the worst being that you need to "whitelist" legitimate bulk mail or it'll get caught), but it's definitely the best approach to killing spam that I've seen yet.
I recommend Movie Madness on Belmont and 43rd (I think). for a lot of anime; they're a rental house that has all the movies you'd think no one stocked anymore. They've got all the anime classics, I think; Evangelion, Lain, Akira, and the like. They also have enough kung-fu flicks to confuse your mind forever.;)
Though I agree that the internet is splendid and it sometimes makes me grasp. Thus above transmits mean I can only use AboveNet?
You know...the parent post, which requests an English version, looks a lot like someone translated it from Chinese in the Fish. The REALLY sad thing is that AVee seems to be a native English speaker.;)
I've often been startled by how easily foreigners can pick up the insane babbling that is English (no flames please, I love our language but it is a hodgepodge of about ten other languages)...and how horribly people can speak it who have it as a first language.
Karate Master: "And TODAY on Wheel of Fish, what do we have!? Ah! A wireless network! Now....will you keep the wireless network, or will you take what's on...broadcast TV?"
Woman: "I'll take...uh...um..."
[everybody shouting different answers at her]
Woman: "I'll take...broadcast TV!!"
Karate Master: "And now we see...what's on...broadcast TV! What's good that's on...broadcast TV?!"
[hushed pause; they turn on a TV, "Friends" is on]
Karate Master: "NOTHING!! THERE'S NOTHING GOOD ON BROADCAST TV!! STUPID! YOU'RE SO STOOPID!!!"
What a very strange name this thing has. A terapin is a turtle, and a mine is a place where you dig up riches. So if you get one of these you will become rich with turtles?
That's the optimistic version. Now, here's my take:
A mine is something that blows up if you get near it. And a turtle is legendary for being slow.
What kind of PR department do these people have?!;)
Slashdot Mirror
The virus part is fine...but eManager is one of the worst spam products ever invented. No scoring, so mail either goes through or gets blocked without any in-betweens. The out-of-the-box rules must have been written by Jonathan Edwards (for those not up on their history, he was a famous Puritan preacher). There's no HTML cleaning ability; the only way to keep nasty javascripts away is to block javascript (which causes every employee to squawk because they lose all their newsletters). When we use the "auto-update" antispam feature that this article's about, we got a 45% false positive rate. The slightest change (numbers substituted for letters, misspellings, etc) invalidates a setting and lets spam through; it's got to match exactly.
I've used eManager for two years and am working to get rid of it. Hell, even thinking about eManager will probably block your legit mail and let in the spam.
The US Immigration and Naturalization Service (now the BCIS as part of their re-org into Homeland Security) trusts the mail implicitly, unless they're sending you a notice that your application was denied (then they send it certified). A notice to come to a fingerprinting was not sent certified, got lost in the mail (although I have serious doubts on whether it was ever sent in the first place), and resulted in a $110 charge for me to reopen the case. Thanks a lot, guys.
I'm sure that plenty of important mail gets lost because some agency or another was too cheap to use a reliable mail service -- after all, if they send it reliably, it costs them a little extra. If, on the other hand, you lose it, they get a hundred bucks for refiling. No disrespect to the post office intended; it's the fault of the system design. Think of mail like you do UDP: Fast, simple, cheap, and unreliable.
...and it worked for me. I'd never heard of Firebird, the database, before this flamewar. I'd bet that not only had most Slashdotters never heard of it, they'll remember it the next time the name comes up.
Pretty sneaky, if you ask me. Now where did I put that tinfoil hat?
Holding the line clogs up your precious line, too. Even if you're not listening, it still wastes your time (and maybe money).
I think we need either more advanced telephone technology, or a different idea.
People have rehashed this idea every time a spam discussion comes up. It will block 99.99% of spam at first, but it's annoying to the sender and a waste of time...and it still doesn't guarantee you get the message when you want it.
Let's say Allen sends a message to Bob. He needs the memo by 5:00 today for the big presentation. Bob was stuck in traffic. He sends it at 3:00 and rushes off to another meeting. Maybe he forgot to use the key; maybe it was changed for this month. In any case, the message gets bounced. In this scenario, email now heavily depends on a manual element, one that is irritating and prone to failure.
Might as well poke a few more holes in this: If this plan gets widespread, spammers can find the magic key in your message simply by searching for something that matches a regular expression (some general form of "Please resend this message with yyf6d55s in the subject line.") and looking for nondictionary words. It's as easy to spot a rejection message in this form as it is to spot spam by looking for an opt-out line.
Who needs a set-top box that crashes or a computer that slows down because it's recording today's episode of Friends?
Well, we want one that won't crash. Or slow down. That's why we want a Linux set-top box. ;)
The tech exists to hack it together right now; it would be moderately expensive and rather ugly, but it could be done (Linux-supported TV-out + IR input port + LIRC + Linux BIOS or the Linux save-to-disk hack + xine/favorite decoder -- google for all these, I'm too lazy to link). And you can't say "Computers and TVs were not made to mix". The DVD player that might be sitting on your shelf is basically a simplified computer. If it can play MP3s, it is even more so. How about your Sega Dreamcast? We ported Linux to the thing, for God's sake! That can perform all the operations needed to call it a computer under Turing's definition...so you already have computers plugged into your TV, unless you're strictly an antenna-only guy.
Linux already works as an OS for many embedded systems. Your set-top box is merely another such system. I won't even get into the quagmire of a DRM argument, but let it be said for now that there are people who have gotten Linux PVRs working. It can be done now. With work, it can be done much more smoothly later.
The justification would be that the copyright holder is doing society a minor but nontrivial harm by holding on to his work, but that that harm could be offset by the additional revenue to the government. If Disney wants to hold on to the copyright for "Steamboat Willie" forever, they're free to do so if they can cough up the greenbacks.
They do. That's exactly what we're complaining about. They pay a congressman, he puts forth a bill for a longer copyright, and they get a longer copyright.
The idea that a corporation should be able to pay the government to defend itself against the rights of the people is completely ridiculous; in fact, it creates a serious conflict of interest. What's more, at some point it has to be recognized that no amount of greenbacks are worth owning information in perpetuity; personally, I'd rather have "Steamboat Willie" usable by anyone than all the mended highways in the country paid for from Disney's coffers. There are some things you can't put a price tag on. Now, someone think up a good Mastercard-ad joke. ;)
One of my favorites, stolen from the Canonical List of Math Jokes:
A project manager, a hardware engineer, and a programmer were in a car. Coming down a hill, a tyre got a puncture, the car went out of control, and a bad crash was only narrowly averted.
The project manager wanted everyone to help draw up a plan of how to fix the car and carry on.
The hardware engineer wanted to change the tyre and carry on.
The programmer wanted to go back to the top of the hill, drive down again, and see if the problem happened again.
I think this would fall under the "statistics" portion of "lies, damned lies, and statistics". I'd feel a lot less skeptical if:
A. The report was put out by a more impartial group than the Wildlife Conservation Society (that's like an endangerment study put out by a big-game hunting club),
B. they included their method and analysis, and
C. they did not preface their findings by "Scientists say..." which usually is shorthand for, "You're stupid, they're smart, we're quoting them, so believe whatever we tell you."
Is there any further information? How did they arrive at a figure of 83% and four Earths?
Exactly: The Mormon pioneers. Of course they were allowed to settle there; in the eyes of the government, they were moving out to a lifeless desert that the US only had a tenuous claim to (and certainly little force to back it up); the only inhabitants were Indians. Sure, they'd let them have it. It would be like letting a group of utopians to found a colony on Mars.
Times have changed slightly, and the world has gotten smaller. The last great immigration to form a nation was (probably, there may have been another) the Zionist immigration to Israel -- and that has been fiercely contested. Another one will be almost impossible. A Mormon-style emigration is unlikely to occur again, on this planet anyway.
They intend to eventually achieve "political autonomy", that is, to become free of federal law after a time. It sounds like a "peaceful rebellion", like the Southern Secession was supposed to be.
Not one, but a large group of states tried this already: in 1860. They had a lot more people interested than a mere 20,000 or so, an existing infrastructure, a cause supported at least in theory by the majority, a cultural identity, and the best Army officers.
They still lost.
This won't work simply because a vast majority of people who join a movement like this are much more comfortable posting on a website blog, K5, or Slashdot than they are at moving to another state simply because of a website; many are crackpots that can agree with no one. There are no "rebel states" where even a significant minority resent being part of the US; whatever state it may be, the residents will instead resent a huge influx of wild-eyed dissidents. The movement is in the name of "liberty", which sounds good, but is an intentionally vague concept that people have a hard time agreeing on, particularly armchair politicians.
My prediction: It won't get off the ground. It's a project like the American Civil War, and the people who propose this kind of thing are far, far less suited to go through with it than their southern counterparts of 142 years ago.
I don't know if this is still true (the last time I used AOL was about '94), but once you started using the free hours, AOL needed a credit card number. Just in case you, uh, go over the limit. What they didn't tell you is that if you did go over the limit, you wouldn't be notified; they just quietly started billing you. Then it was the devil's own work to try and get them to stop, and especially to get your CC out of their database.
If this is all still the case, using your "free" hours is shooting yourself in the foot.
A. It's not just a man helping someone; it's an organization of activists that has some rather extreme viewpoints, that some of us don't trust. They're asking for our money, so we would do well to examine them carefully.
B. The "needy" in this case can be defined as "friends of Indymedia in another country". We're not helping some starving kid here. I wouldn't give the editors of Indymedia a computer if they wanted one. Why would I want to help them give one to their friends?
C. The feasibility of the project needs to be looked at as well. Does this project make any sense considering the country's electrical grid, laws, politics, and Internet connectivity, or is it just a political gesture? I suspect it's the latter.
Dogma, BTW, is an established viewpoint created to be repeated without scrutiny. What you're seeing here on Slashdot is "skepticism", which is a whole different animal.
This is almost a flame, but I'd say that from the comments I've seen so far, NO ONE has been really affected. The liberal/civil liberties/privacy types say they've been affected, but if you read further down their comments, they'll all say the same thing: "I worry about our government more than I did before". Not "I got jailed for being a member of an Al-Qaida spin-off cell", and not even "my phone is tapped 24/7 because I read Slashdot and use Linux". In short, those American citizens who are saying they are affected by the laws are "comfortably concerned citizens". Although I'm sure some unscrupulous government droid will use these laws to an evil end, no one seems to have been seriously affected yet.
Of course, a paranoid way of looking at things might be that the reason no one has said anything is that the people affected are either trying to keep a low profile or already are in a top-secret federal prison somewhere....
A cult following isn't the answer to everything, but it's still quite a force. After my band, Victim Of Circumstance, won a local "Battle of the Bands" contest, we had some people who knew some of our songs and would come to every concert. If the crowd was a little bit shy, they'd start a moshpit for us. They'd ask us to play at their parties, schools, or churches. People are already trying to get us played on the radio, although it hasn't happened yet except on KBPS Portland (a highschool station).
Successful pop bands tap into a movement, or create one. They make people feel like they belong. There are millions of professional bands under the radar screen because they either are all about business (wedding bands, etc) or do not want the fame, and they never had to pass the "gatekeepers", as you call them. So let me ask you: Are you in it for the music, or are you just trying to become famous? The two are not mutually exclusive, but they almost are. Think of all the bands that people talk of; how many times have you heard, "They used to be cool when they were underground, but now that everyone listens to them they suck." People like feeling like they belong to a small group, too, so that has something to do with it.
If you're trying to become famous, I can't help you, as my band isn't famous. Really, Slashdot is the wrong place to learn about fame. There are famous people in nerd-dom, but the only people who know about them are other nerds. :)
If you want to learn how to get to know a lot of people and play music for them, then get a core of devoted fans and have them plug you every chance they get. Start a mailing list and talk to them directly; find out if any highschool or college fans have ins on a radio station (I can't count the number of times someone's said "Oh, my uncle works for that station"...and high-school and college radio stations are always good targets for new bands). Autograph your CDs after your concerts, and mingle with the crowd before, after, and during. Make them feel like part of the band, not just an audience, and they'll take care of you.
Get together with other bands, too. When Nirvana became big, every record executive in the country went to Seattle to get bands. They got Pearl Jam, STP, and Jane's Addiction. Bands do better, in my opinion, if they know each other and promote each other.
You only need to deal with the RIAA if you want to be famous, be on Clear Channel and MTV. If you DO want to be any of these things, it's still a good idea to take my advice. You can never have too many connections.
Programming the time on a VCR is a bit different. People always use that as an example, but read The Design of Everyday Things for why so many VCRs are hard to program. It's not because the average user is stupid, it's because of horrible design on the part of the manufacturer. The average user (my wife, for example) can easily program a VCR using a simple on-screen menu; it's when the programming involves a few (or too many) buttons, no output, etc that all hell breaks loose.
In addition, one should never cite ignorance as a barrier to convenience. If the thing is felt to be necessary (and "Joe Sixpack" usually considers free music and cheap DVDs necessary) outweighs the lack of knowledge, a user will learn; that's basic psychology. The thousands of people who used to only play Solitaire, but heard they could get free music on the Internet, learned how to use Napster.
As I see it, however, regional encoding will probably stay, even though it sucks, just because Americans aren't going to complain. The average person won't be buying from Japan, since DVDs have been kept at an exceptionally cheap rate; almost cheaper than a CD. Hell, look at Lord of the Rings; they're selling the DVD for $15 at Fry's Electronics. The average DVD sells for about $25. I'm expecting any day to get DVDs free in boxes of cereal...and to throw them away!
Under this scheme, Europe gets shafted worst; it pays the highest and often gets a censored copy. The Asian countries barely even use DVD...maybe Japan (no experience here), but certainly not anything south of that; that's what VCDs are for. So I see no public outcry building.
This gentleman is a troll...every point he brings up is self-contradicting. The people who say "More power to him! America sucks!" and those who say "That bastard! What an idiot!" are probably both being snickered at because they're taking it so seriously.
Frankly, it's hard for me to believe someone could unintentionally be that stupid, or that wrong, in an article. Consider that his "two beliefs we have to drop" are the same, most of his evidence is just plain false, and his language is all inflammatory. I see 300 comments, most of them furious, so I figure his troll succeeded.
That said, I think it's kind of stupid that the Register would put something like that up even as a satire or a joke; it's not April Fools and I like to read pertinant, useful news there (not to mention the BOFH :) ). It's as if they posted a goatsex link or a "BSD is dying" article.
Ah...but can you use the Internet while sitting on the toilet?
;)
Of course, you can, but you need a wireless connection, mobile hardware, batteries...and you're doing it in a rather disgusting environment, around water. Do you really want your laptop/palm/subnotebook around that? And if a fly comes buzzing by or the dog climbs on your sofa...I assure you, a newspaper works a LOT better.
Returning to the "newspaper in the bathroom" scenario, in my office we have a lot of people who kindly leave the Sports section, the comics, or other bits of their newspaper in the bathroom stalls. So when the next gentleman comes in, he too can entertain himself on the crapper. All for $0.75....which is a price that beats any Internet connection's, let alone that of the hardware that you need for it. Plus, it's a great way of "file-sharing" without some corporation's lawyers prosecuting you for violating the DMCA.
Sure, I can read more news on the Internet, and quicker, at my desk...but there are some situations in which it's really handy to have a good old-fashioned newspaper around.
At the government agency where I work, we get thousands of spam messages a day from slimeballs all over the world. Why? Well, another agency posted all our email addresses to the web once, people in the agency are clueless and "punch the monkey", etc. The usual reasons. We installed an anti-spam program from Trend (e-Manager), but it's a string-search program.
;)
Note to newbies at server-based spam-blocking: String-search programs suck. Half the time I got false positives and had users parading outside my cube with pitchforks and torches. The other half of the time it was false negatives and the user received the spam...and then sent it to us. ALL the time, I was updating the list of banned phrases, which is essentially "shutting the barn door behind the horse".
Recently, I've been testing DCC. It operates on checksums, kind of a "word-of-mouth" approach to spam. The theory is that if you have enough DCC servers, keeping a count of the message checksums, then you can block it based on its "bulkiness". I tested my inbox on a CGI demo of it that they have on their server, and it had a 100% accuracy rate.
I'm not going to go into it much further, since you can read the docs, but this is the first day of the test, and so far, I've got a couple thousand hits; 90% of it is spam (I'm updating my whitelist as I write this). There are a couple programs like it (I heard on the Register that they're putting out one like it using a P2P client model), but I think the future of spam-busting is in this.
Gazing at the lewd/fraudulent/ridiculous subject lines cropping up in my DCC logfile, I realize: If the Internet had a body, this part would be the ass. Seeing all of it makes you almost despair for humanity....except for the fact that DCC caught it, and you know people won't have to look at it.
As far as I can see, the more admins get involved in this, the harder it becomes for spam to propagate...and there are a dozen other tricks you can do to cut it down. So what are you waiting for? Join in the fun. There are some problems with this method (the worst being that you need to "whitelist" legitimate bulk mail or it'll get caught), but it's definitely the best approach to killing spam that I've seen yet.
I recommend Movie Madness on Belmont and 43rd (I think). for a lot of anime; they're a rental house that has all the movies you'd think no one stocked anymore. They've got all the anime classics, I think; Evangelion, Lain, Akira, and the like. They also have enough kung-fu flicks to confuse your mind forever. ;)
Whoops...the guy was quoting. My fault; sorry AVee. ;)
Though I agree that the internet is splendid and it sometimes makes me grasp.
;)
Thus above transmits mean I can only use AboveNet?
You know...the parent post, which requests an English version, looks a lot like someone translated it from Chinese in the Fish. The REALLY sad thing is that AVee seems to be a native English speaker.
I've often been startled by how easily foreigners can pick up the insane babbling that is English (no flames please, I love our language but it is a hodgepodge of about ten other languages)...and how horribly people can speak it who have it as a first language.
Karate Master: "And TODAY on Wheel of Fish, what do we have!? Ah! A wireless network! Now....will you keep the wireless network, or will you take what's on...broadcast TV?"
Woman: "I'll take...uh...um..."
[everybody shouting different answers at her]
Woman: "I'll take...broadcast TV!!"
Karate Master: "And now we see...what's on...broadcast TV! What's good that's on...broadcast TV?!"
[hushed pause; they turn on a TV, "Friends" is on]
Karate Master: "NOTHING!! THERE'S NOTHING GOOD ON BROADCAST TV!! STUPID! YOU'RE SO STOOPID!!!"
What a very strange name this thing has. A terapin is a turtle, and a mine is a place where you dig up riches.
;)
So if you get one of these you will become rich with turtles?
That's the optimistic version. Now, here's my take:
A mine is something that blows up if you get near it. And a turtle is legendary for being slow.
What kind of PR department do these people have?!