I'm not sure how many of these are true, as the site is a bit dated, and some of the reference links no longer work, but I do know the comments he made about Malaysia are accurate because I saw it on a news program (and could hardly believe what I was hearing).
Anyway, a lot of it is media perception. If the media keeps stressing a certain aspect of someone in the spotlight, eventually everyone will think it's true.
And let's not forget the true king of political quotes, Dan Quayle!
I've never smoked marijuana myself, but I've known plenty of people who have/do. Never have I known someone who crashed their car, got pregnant, or etc., while high on marijuana. OTOH, I've known people who have run off the road or done other stupid things while drunk. And I've never known anyone who got pregnant while drunk or high... Like people need any outside influence to make that mistake.
"It's more dangerous than we thought"... What a bunch a shit...
I think the main concern is impaired judgment, which *does* happen when you've smoked marijuana. The commercials list some possibilities, but they are not saying that *will* happen. It's a scare tactic, but that's the point. A commercial just showing people sitting around, laughing at stupid jokes is a waste of everyone's time.
I personally think the South Park guys had a nice opinion on drug use. Certain drugs won't necessessarily ruin your life with one use, but the concern is that you would get lazy and/or just lose ambition. If you've already got a nice job and familty, it probably doesn't apply to you (unless you allow it to become a problem), but there are plenty of people in the world who would rather use drugs than work on things to proactively improve their lives. It's all about balance, which, unfortunately, a lot of people around the world just cannot maintain.
Look at it this way, think about how many people blame some sort of substance abuse on problems in their lives. Now think about how many people list substance abuse as one of the reasons they became successful.
Ignore celebrities. Unfortunately, the rich and famous live under different rules that the rest of us do. Sad, but true. And something that is more appropriate in another discussion, altogether.:)
I always thought it was ironic that Metallica got popular for exactly the same reason that they were clamping down on Napster...bootlegging (not piracy...there is a difference). Metallica used to encourage their fans to record shows and pass tapes around, that's how bands with no radio play got notoriety. Live shows, touring and playing as much music as possible used to be the way to gain a name for yourself. Now, selling out to the highest bidder seems to be the way.
You raise a good point, but the biggest difference between trading bootlegs and Napster is that with the bootlegs, fans are just trading with fans. In the case of Napster, someone was trying to get rich off of it. I think had Metallica stressed this aspect of it, they would have come off in a better light.
This has always pissed me off. People talk about the effectiveness of internet advertising. How is this measured? I think it's measured by click-throughs and purchases. How do they measure the effectiveness of print advertising? There's really no way, IMO. You can look at sales revenues, but chances are that advertising isn't the only reason for fluctuations in these numbers.
So, I've always felt that saying internet advertising doesn't work cannot be proven. If I read something, but just choose to not click it, it's still hit a targeted user, and I might make some purchases in the future based on this knowledge. How many people see a commercial on TV and then run out right that second to go buy whatever?!
You can argue about bandwidth costs and such, but there's money that goes into print advertising, as well. It's just a different medium.
I read an article in a local paper about how a lot of outsourcing is done to India. Apparently, there are a few companies who specialize in phone support for Western companies.
There are a few reasons for this:
India has a large, educated, English-speaking population.
This population is underemployed.
Outsourcing this can be cheaper than having domestic phone support staff.
More power to them, but the article brought up an interesting point. These companies make it a point to try to make the person calling support believe they are speaking to someone in the US. They will do things like show episodes of "Friends" or highlights from a football game to their staff to familiarize them with pop culture. The support folks come up with more Americanized names. This aspect of the service bothered me, but I could understand their rationale. For these same reasons, some of the people interviewed in the article said it was against company policy to give out client names, but they claimed that they had very large clients.
Just want to share info (and hope this post doesn't bring out any xenophobia).
And some people are paying hundreds for region free players!
I just purchased my 2nd region-free DVD player last night. It cost me $230 with shipping from the Netherlands. Definitely more than the Apex you are mentioning, but I'll also be getting a lot of nice extras that make a difference for me (Component Video, DTS Decoding). Different strokes for different folks.:-)
A co-worker knows some people who used to work for Playboy. Their jobs were to basically search the internet to make sure that other people were not profiting from copyrighted Playboy materials. So, these people really were paid to surf for porn.
That said, they supposedly ran across some very bizzare and disturbing sites while working. Be careful what you wish for.:-)
For those of you who do not know, there was a point where Buffy was dead (OK, so this happens a couple of times:-). Buffy's friends create a robot version of Buffy, so all the demons do not know she is dead. If they knew this, the demons would realize there would be no one to stop them. So, the BuffyBot was a preventative measure. (Think a blonde firewall)
And before you ask how a bunch of kids could create a robot...one of them is a geeky computer-type (who is also a babe), and there was also an early episode that featured a crazy robot (which maybe they reverse-engineered?).
The BuffyBot did have flaws. It's AI wasn't as good as it could have been, and the robot wasn't very durable. However, these factors can be excused, given that it still looked great in leather pants. >:)
You have to wonder about the possibilities for cheating with these types of devices.
When I was in high school, the TI calculators that were programmable had just started coming out. There were several people who enter equations and other cheats into them.
Some teachers would not allow these types of calculators to be used, others would check before the test that they didn't have any equations or other types of cheats stored in them, and others would actually ask people to clear out all the memory in them.
So, why should Nintendo drop their price? The PS2 is currently the same price, but it's also been out a full year longer. That's not reason enough for it to be cheaper, but most people think that way. So, the system to compare price with is the XBox. It's already cheaper, and after the price drop, it'll be the same price.
Nintendo has no real reason to drop their prices, now. The rumored price drop later this year? It'll probably be just in time for Christmas.
Despite what melted web servers around the world say, not everyone reads Slashdot.
After the original story was posted, I made it a point to tell everyone I worked with about it. Several of my co-workers made sure they opted out of things they didn't want. But I'm sure only a small portion of the Yahoo userbase were made aware of the changes in this context. I believe there was e-mail sent out by Yahoo explaining, in a very passive way, the changes made to their privacy policy. Most people probably just skimmed it (if at all), didn't see anything glaringly bad, and then just went along, business as usual.
In this case, I'd say it matters how you learned of this change. Obviously, Yahoo isn't going to paint themselves to look like bad guys in e-mails to their own users.
So, what's the point of using a purposefully misleading intro paragraph? Slashdot is where I learned of the acronym "FUD" ("Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt," for those who do not know) but it seems like putting a misleading intro like this will help spread it, rather than help stop it.
How many people do you think will only read the main page, and go away thinking it's the truth? Yeah, it's their own fault for not reading the entire story, but everyone is guilty of this from time to time.
This is mostly about how to bring this topic to the attention of your supervisors, since if your users are already saying there's no official policy against using p2p apps, they'll likely to just tell you to get bent on further discussion.
Over the past year or so, there have been plenty of universities that have made decisions on P2P apps, going in both directions. You can use some of these instituions as examples of why you need to police this kind of traffic. Bring up the same reasons that these universities did, and that you brought up in your question (mainly legal protection and consumption of resources).
There are also articles on other sites that list some of the universites that have banned Napster. Here's one article: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/4172.html . They mention the following universities: Kent State, Rice, Seton Hall and Villanova. I'm sure there are others.
You can argue that if these major universities with plenty of money can't handle this traffic, how is your small public school district supposed to handle it? Hopefully, the money argument will help you out.
One final thing you can do (and this is fighting dirty), is point out how much pr0n is out there on p2p apps. That should get someone's attention.
"...games that feature decapitation, amputation, killing of humans with lethal weapons or through hand-to-hand combat, rape, car-jackings, aggravated assault and other violent felonies."
...it looks live I've been playing the wrong games my whole life.;-)
Maybe this is just sloppy writing, but in the first paragraph, the author says this bill "would create an exchange of mid-level information technology executives between the public and private sectors." Everywhere else in the article, he says IT workers, tech workers, etc.
I'm curious now if this bill is meant to swap workers or just managers?
So what happens if you refresh a page or hit an article a few times? Does this count as a single hit or will each hit count as its own page (and reduce from your 1000 page bank)? I guess the question is pages vs. page hits.
One the one hand, since chances are the comments associated with an article will change on subsequent views, I can see the logic that individual page hits are counted.
But on the other hand, Slashdot churns out a lot of news stories, so hitting 1000 articles will happen relatively quickly for some users, so I could see where this might actually discourage them from continuing in discussions (well, only if they think it's too expensive).
Re:AIM service does some things *right*
on
AOL vs. Trillian
·
· Score: 2
* the ICQ UI is a horrendous mess. AIM has a good, simple UI. Cleaner in many ways then the Trillian version I used. And as the release new versions of the AIM client, whenever they change default behaviors (like minimizing to task bar vs system tray, etc) they're very good at letting users get the old behavior back in the options menu.
Blame this on AOL (although it *could* be some internal ICQ folks who are causing this). I've been using ICQ for a while, and the default interface used to be very clean. At some point, it got loaded with extra widgets and crap. Since I knew how ICQ was "supposed" to look, I've been able to clean up my ICQ with each subsequent release. I think newer upgrades keep your preferences, so you don't have to clean up each time.
* I have never received AIM spam, but those two weeks of ICQ were nothing but teen porn ads. I'm not sure if its ICQ numbering scheme that makes it so spam prone, or something AIM does better
In your ICQ preferences, you can elect to reject messages from anyone not on your contact list. An unfortunate side effect is that sometimes, people can't send you messages, but that's why you should have authorization to add people to lists, rather than just letting people add you without your permission.
Also, the fact that ICQ using numbers as user IDs makes it vastly superior to other IM programs. One ICQ, I have a number, and I can use a normal name. On Yahoo and AOL, I have to use some God-awful l33t name that uses my zip code, age, and my shoe size. It's just clunky and not as well-designed, IMO.
Oh, and I think it goes without saying that ICQ is my favorite.:-)
Heh, did anyone else see "CS Cheaters" and automatically think "Counter-Strike cheaters?" Maybe a sign I've been out of school for a while...or maybe there are some of you currently in school who thought the same thing.;-)
For those of you who may not have heard of it, PunkBuster is one of the leaders in trying to stop online cheating. It first gained popularity for Counter-Strike use, but it seems that id is going to work with the guys for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Interview here
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, if this is fake, then is it possible that Bert is not evil?!
Here's a link to the "Tech" section of the FAQ, which is probably a good place to start.
I think it's probably more realistic to say that virtually ALL politicians have said stupid things.
Here's some proof for Mr. Gore.:
http://www.gargaro.com/algore.html
I'm not sure how many of these are true, as the site is a bit dated, and some of the reference links no longer work, but I do know the comments he made about Malaysia are accurate because I saw it on a news program (and could hardly believe what I was hearing).
Anyway, a lot of it is media perception. If the media keeps stressing a certain aspect of someone in the spotlight, eventually everyone will think it's true.
And let's not forget the true king of political quotes, Dan Quayle!
I think the main concern is impaired judgment, which *does* happen when you've smoked marijuana. The commercials list some possibilities, but they are not saying that *will* happen. It's a scare tactic, but that's the point. A commercial just showing people sitting around, laughing at stupid jokes is a waste of everyone's time.
I personally think the South Park guys had a nice opinion on drug use. Certain drugs won't necessessarily ruin your life with one use, but the concern is that you would get lazy and/or just lose ambition. If you've already got a nice job and familty, it probably doesn't apply to you (unless you allow it to become a problem), but there are plenty of people in the world who would rather use drugs than work on things to proactively improve their lives. It's all about balance, which, unfortunately, a lot of people around the world just cannot maintain.
Look at it this way, think about how many people blame some sort of substance abuse on problems in their lives. Now think about how many people list substance abuse as one of the reasons they became successful.
Ignore celebrities. Unfortunately, the rich and famous live under different rules that the rest of us do. Sad, but true. And something that is more appropriate in another discussion, altogether. :)
What you are holding in your hands are bootleg copies, sir.
Here is a link to the pirate anime FAQ:
http://www.digital.anime.org.uk/piratefaq.html
You raise a good point, but the biggest difference between trading bootlegs and Napster is that with the bootlegs, fans are just trading with fans. In the case of Napster, someone was trying to get rich off of it. I think had Metallica stressed this aspect of it, they would have come off in a better light.
This has always pissed me off. People talk about the effectiveness of internet advertising. How is this measured? I think it's measured by click-throughs and purchases. How do they measure the effectiveness of print advertising? There's really no way, IMO. You can look at sales revenues, but chances are that advertising isn't the only reason for fluctuations in these numbers.
So, I've always felt that saying internet advertising doesn't work cannot be proven. If I read something, but just choose to not click it, it's still hit a targeted user, and I might make some purchases in the future based on this knowledge. How many people see a commercial on TV and then run out right that second to go buy whatever?!
You can argue about bandwidth costs and such, but there's money that goes into print advertising, as well. It's just a different medium.
I read an article in a local paper about how a lot of outsourcing is done to India. Apparently, there are a few companies who specialize in phone support for Western companies.
There are a few reasons for this:
More power to them, but the article brought up an interesting point. These companies make it a point to try to make the person calling support believe they are speaking to someone in the US. They will do things like show episodes of "Friends" or highlights from a football game to their staff to familiarize them with pop culture. The support folks come up with more Americanized names. This aspect of the service bothered me, but I could understand their rationale. For these same reasons, some of the people interviewed in the article said it was against company policy to give out client names, but they claimed that they had very large clients.
Just want to share info (and hope this post doesn't bring out any xenophobia).
And some people are paying hundreds for region free players!
I just purchased my 2nd region-free DVD player last night. It cost me $230 with shipping from the Netherlands. Definitely more than the Apex you are mentioning, but I'll also be getting a lot of nice extras that make a difference for me (Component Video, DTS Decoding). Different strokes for different folks. :-)
A co-worker knows some people who used to work for Playboy. Their jobs were to basically search the internet to make sure that other people were not profiting from copyrighted Playboy materials. So, these people really were paid to surf for porn.
That said, they supposedly ran across some very bizzare and disturbing sites while working. Be careful what you wish for. :-)
Hah! Is there such a thing as "too feisty" for Slashdot?
If it's about female sexuality, then, yes, I would say so. :)
hehe, this is why I'm buying season box sets on DVD. :)
For those of you who do not know, there was a point where Buffy was dead (OK, so this happens a couple of times :-). Buffy's friends create a robot version of Buffy, so all the demons do not know she is dead. If they knew this, the demons would realize there would be no one to stop them. So, the BuffyBot was a preventative measure. (Think a blonde firewall)
And before you ask how a bunch of kids could create a robot...one of them is a geeky computer-type (who is also a babe), and there was also an early episode that featured a crazy robot (which maybe they reverse-engineered?).
The BuffyBot did have flaws. It's AI wasn't as good as it could have been, and the robot wasn't very durable. However, these factors can be excused, given that it still looked great in leather pants. >:)
You have to wonder about the possibilities for cheating with these types of devices.
When I was in high school, the TI calculators that were programmable had just started coming out. There were several people who enter equations and other cheats into them.
Some teachers would not allow these types of calculators to be used, others would check before the test that they didn't have any equations or other types of cheats stored in them, and others would actually ask people to clear out all the memory in them.
Glad I don't have to worry about this any more. :)
So, will there be any booth babes at any of these parties?
Before you try that link, the site has not yet recovered from this morning. :)
I got home about 4:00 am. I went to work and was there in body, but even less in spirit than normal. What do I count as?
Here are the current prices from EB Games
So, why should Nintendo drop their price? The PS2 is currently the same price, but it's also been out a full year longer. That's not reason enough for it to be cheaper, but most people think that way. So, the system to compare price with is the XBox. It's already cheaper, and after the price drop, it'll be the same price.
Nintendo has no real reason to drop their prices, now. The rumored price drop later this year? It'll probably be just in time for Christmas.
Despite what melted web servers around the world say, not everyone reads Slashdot.
After the original story was posted, I made it a point to tell everyone I worked with about it. Several of my co-workers made sure they opted out of things they didn't want. But I'm sure only a small portion of the Yahoo userbase were made aware of the changes in this context. I believe there was e-mail sent out by Yahoo explaining, in a very passive way, the changes made to their privacy policy. Most people probably just skimmed it (if at all), didn't see anything glaringly bad, and then just went along, business as usual.
In this case, I'd say it matters how you learned of this change. Obviously, Yahoo isn't going to paint themselves to look like bad guys in e-mails to their own users.
So, what's the point of using a purposefully misleading intro paragraph? Slashdot is where I learned of the acronym "FUD" ("Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt," for those who do not know) but it seems like putting a misleading intro like this will help spread it, rather than help stop it.
How many people do you think will only read the main page, and go away thinking it's the truth? Yeah, it's their own fault for not reading the entire story, but everyone is guilty of this from time to time.
This is mostly about how to bring this topic to the attention of your supervisors, since if your users are already saying there's no official policy against using p2p apps, they'll likely to just tell you to get bent on further discussion.
Over the past year or so, there have been plenty of universities that have made decisions on P2P apps, going in both directions. You can use some of these instituions as examples of why you need to police this kind of traffic. Bring up the same reasons that these universities did, and that you brought up in your question (mainly legal protection and consumption of resources).
Here are a few examples:
There are also articles on other sites that list some of the universites that have banned Napster. Here's one article: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/4172.html . They mention the following universities: Kent State, Rice, Seton Hall and Villanova. I'm sure there are others.
You can argue that if these major universities with plenty of money can't handle this traffic, how is your small public school district supposed to handle it? Hopefully, the money argument will help you out.
One final thing you can do (and this is fighting dirty), is point out how much pr0n is out there on p2p apps. That should get someone's attention.
"...games that feature decapitation, amputation, killing of humans with lethal weapons or through hand-to-hand combat, rape, car-jackings, aggravated assault and other violent felonies."
;-)
...it looks live I've been playing the wrong games my whole life.
Maybe this is just sloppy writing, but in the first paragraph, the author says this bill "would create an exchange of mid-level information technology executives between the public and private sectors." Everywhere else in the article, he says IT workers, tech workers, etc.
I'm curious now if this bill is meant to swap workers or just managers?
So what happens if you refresh a page or hit an article a few times? Does this count as a single hit or will each hit count as its own page (and reduce from your 1000 page bank)? I guess the question is pages vs. page hits.
One the one hand, since chances are the comments associated with an article will change on subsequent views, I can see the logic that individual page hits are counted.
But on the other hand, Slashdot churns out a lot of news stories, so hitting 1000 articles will happen relatively quickly for some users, so I could see where this might actually discourage them from continuing in discussions (well, only if they think it's too expensive).
* the ICQ UI is a horrendous mess. AIM has a good, simple UI. Cleaner in many ways then the Trillian version I used. And as the release new versions of the AIM client, whenever they change default behaviors (like minimizing to task bar vs system tray, etc) they're very good at letting users get the old behavior back in the options menu.
Blame this on AOL (although it *could* be some internal ICQ folks who are causing this). I've been using ICQ for a while, and the default interface used to be very clean. At some point, it got loaded with extra widgets and crap. Since I knew how ICQ was "supposed" to look, I've been able to clean up my ICQ with each subsequent release. I think newer upgrades keep your preferences, so you don't have to clean up each time.
* I have never received AIM spam, but those two weeks of ICQ were nothing but teen porn ads. I'm not sure if its ICQ numbering scheme that makes it so spam prone, or something AIM does better
In your ICQ preferences, you can elect to reject messages from anyone not on your contact list. An unfortunate side effect is that sometimes, people can't send you messages, but that's why you should have authorization to add people to lists, rather than just letting people add you without your permission.
Also, the fact that ICQ using numbers as user IDs makes it vastly superior to other IM programs. One ICQ, I have a number, and I can use a normal name. On Yahoo and AOL, I have to use some God-awful l33t name that uses my zip code, age, and my shoe size. It's just clunky and not as well-designed, IMO.
Oh, and I think it goes without saying that ICQ is my favorite. :-)
Heh, did anyone else see "CS Cheaters" and automatically think "Counter-Strike cheaters?" Maybe a sign I've been out of school for a while...or maybe there are some of you currently in school who thought the same thing. ;-)
For those of you who may not have heard of it, PunkBuster is one of the leaders in trying to stop online cheating. It first gained popularity for Counter-Strike use, but it seems that id is going to work with the guys for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Interview here