The problem is, they passed the point of no return a while back.
If SCO gives up, they have lost and will go out of business rather quickly. They are not going to be able to settle so easily with IBM because IBM's out for blood.
If SCO plods on, they are most likely to lose. But there's some chance for them to win.
It's also the case that, even if they aren't doing a pump-n-dump on the stock, they are still getting paid huge amounts of money and will continue to do so as long as the company is a operating concern. If they give up, that happens relatively quickly. If they plod along, as long as they can avoid a ruling, they can still get paid.
I think you are confusing putting something that you have *some* experience on, even if it's not especially substantial (padding), with putting something that you have *no* experience on (lying). But that's OK, because I didn't give an actual definition for "padding".
What I forgive somewhat is padding, not outright lying. If somebody puts Java on their resume, I'd expect them to at least be able to explain a little bit about it, maybe talking about interfaces, inner classes, etc. Perhaps they screwed around with it at home for a while, or made some sort of one-off tool with it at their last job so they could have that extra buzzword on their resume. That's what I'm getting at.
Don't know what your experience is, but life showed me that you can't quantify people.
I've seen folks with a BS or even an MS from great schools who couldn't code their way out of a box. I've seen bright folks who had such obnoxious personalities that nobody wants to work with them. I've seen folks with a PhD in random off-the-wall fields with no "useful" degrees who can both code well and manage people. I've seen grads from great schools with no common sense. I've seen folks who didn't graduate and got a plum job and then had problem years down the road when they were trying to find a new job and the market wasn't the same as before so they couldn't. I've torn apart folks in an interview because they didn't know anything about the words they stuffed in their resume. I've seen excellent artists getting in trouble in art schools because they didn't stretch their own canvas or used computers or such things.
There could be a variety of reasons why your brothers are doing better than you are other than education.
See, there's a difference between "padding your resume with keywords" and a fake degree. One's trying to defeat the keyword filter in an HR system, the other is outright lying.
The problem with your opinion is that there are some folks who didn't graduate from HS, College, or both who have made millions. Bill Gates is one of them. But, on the average, a dropout isn't going to make as much money as somebody who got the BS. But that doesn't mean that the other 99.9% of folks who didn't "finish their education" are particularly brilliant.
By drawing a sharp line between a PhD and a grade school education, you are confusing the issue. Most businesses don't care about a PhD, they generally care about folks with a bachleurs or a masters and that's about it.
An accredited degree, in theory, has somebody checking up on them to make sure that the life experience is really valid if it's used. Generally most accredited schools will still make you pass tests to make sure that you know the stuff. Otherwise, they lose accreditation and nobody takes them seriously.
Honarary degrees are similarly interesting. It's usually a given that they require a lot of approval from the various professors, who are snooty enough to not give a degree to just anybody. And also, if a school gives out too many dumb honorary degrees, nobody takes them seriously.
So there's generally some sort of checks to make sure that this doesn't get majorly out of hand.
The problem is that even if teachers were to want to change things, there's too many other forces at work tying their hands. Because if they don't use computers, somehow kids will not be able to catch up to students in India, Japan, Europe, etc. or be able to take advantage of computers. If the principal or superintendant doesn't get unhappy, the parents will.
The really stupid thing is that computer use is really starting to be culturally indocrinated, so teaching kids how to computer really isn't as important as it used to be.
Actually, making a proper film projector that doesn't break the film, plays it back at the proper rate, etc. isn't trivial.
You've got two options. If you store things on most forms of digital media, you are not guaranteed a long media lifespan, but when you copy the data, you don't lose anything.
If you have analog media, like film or paper, you have a slightly longer window of opportunity when your media is degrading, but it's also problematic. Remember, an incredible percentage of the litarary output since the 19th century has been printed on wood-base paper that is slowly decaying. Folks didn't realize until much more recently that this was happening. Movie film requires incredibly expensive freezer storage or else it decays pretty rapidly. And you can't make lossless copies, every time you copy it, you lose something.
The problem is that archival media isn't. It's just media that decays a little slower than otherwise, but it all requires care. It either requires a team of librarians who protect relatively massive low-tech storage of information, or it requires a well thought-out digital system.
The digital system is actually not that hard. You just need to accept that you need a building stuffed with hard disks, plus a backup building of hard disks. The reason why so many old files aren't readable isn't necessarily because the creators did stupid things, it's because they packed them efficently and didn't wory about what would happen when they were gone, generally because they figured their system would be replaced with something better.
The biggest thing is that the easiest files to read are the ones that nobody wants to store because they are so huge. If you scanned an image 20 years ago and saved it as a simple bitmap and had an accompanying description that explained that it was x pixels by y pixels, with a specific color depth and pixel format, with a specific reference primary, etc. it will be pretty easy to read it. If you stored it in some weird compressed format, say an Apple II HGR screendump, where the format requires special interpretation, and don't include documentation on the format, etc. then it's pretty hard to read. If I store a database dump in the AppleWorks GS database format, I won't be able to read it. If I stored it as a CSV file or a text file or an XML file and include explanations of the fields, it's still readable.
The problem is, storing it in a future-proof way is going to take up a lot more space because you don't want to use any sort of nifty encodings or compression. Hence a building full of drives.
Similarly, you can avoid decay if you pay attention. You can't just put a CD-R on a shelf and expect it to last 100 years. You need to be able to verify that a drive is still functioning properly and replace it when it fails. You need to be able to upgrade the servers every few years so that they are still able to interface with the rest of the world. Like keeping paper media around, this requires care.
The thing is, eventually your analog media will die, no matter how well you take care of it, no matter how careful you are. So you need to copy, except that every copy you make of analog media involves loss.
Actually, most of the modern microbroadcasters make extra-sure that they don't interfere with existing stations. Most folks can't afford enough power to broadcast over an existing station. The vandals who try to replace signals (best known by the "Max Headrom" prankster) are a seperate group of folks.
I'm not on the streets protesting for them, but the microbroadcasters have a pretty good point. The NAB has, more or less, done nothing but lie to congress to try to protect the interests of the big companies. The problem is when the FCC spends too much time protecting corporate interests and not enough time protecting *our* interests.
The thing is, I think the technology-independent prepetual storage device isn't particularly important. Really, you just need to preserve for a relatively long span of time the ability to play stuff back. The interesting part about the evolution in optical formats has been the drive to have stuff in the CD-sized disk. So a DVD drive can read CDs as well and can handle a multitude of different application formats. Notice that the WORM and MD drives didn't catch on, but CD-R and CD-RW drives did. All of the next standard formats will have enough of the origional CD and DVD standards in them to make it so that your old media will work in the new player.
Besides, if we can get the media biz off of the DRM crack-pipe, you'll just stuff it all onto your massive multi-terabyte hard drive down the road.
I don't mind that my CDs may rot that much, as long as I'm allowed to back them up onto new media. Folks have been faced with that problem many times. My parents would always buy a record and then copy it to a cassette tape because they wanted to keep the record in good condition.
I don't think your idea to be able to sell rights to a song or movie, independent of format, will fly, either. You end up destroying the incentive for the creator of the media to offer a better format in the first place unless it was hideously expensive, such that you'd only do that for your favorite movies or songs.
I'd disagree. You are mixing the groupthink anti-corporate and anti-spam bias together and calling it an anti-marketing bias. I think most folks are not against marketing, they are against marketing that is more annoying than useful.
The problem is that Victoria's Secret needs to chose carefully each person they send out the catalog to. If they don't get leads from their customers, they don't send catalogs. So it's a self-regulating process that tries to get catalogs in front of people who might be interested.
The problem is that email advertising, to date, hasn't been selective. If the merchants had to spend a few dollars making sure somebody is interested in something, we'd not be complaining. But it's cheaper to annoy most of the 'net than it is to actually target the advertisements.
The biggest problem with this pay-to-advertise system is that it really screws with the little guy (a.k.a. your obscure Bug shop in Tampa Bay) because they are probably not prepared to put up a $20,000 cash bond in order to do business. Which really destroys one of the central advantages of the Internet -- the ability of the little guy to attract audiences they wouldn't otherwise.
The other big thing is that if you really do care about your Bug or thong lingerie, you'd probably end up going to an impartial review site (the bug equivelent of ArsTechnica or AnandTech or whatnot) or typing it into Google, not simply by reading your email.
I think that the best way is how everything else works...
With one's will, there's a trusted friend to execute it.
You can do better with electronic media. Maintain a list of a select few friends who are to "verify" that you are dead. Bonus points would be to have pieces of the encryption key to the "file'o'fun" distributed to said few friends, such that the contents of your final message, which will probably include passwords and hidden directories containing pr0n,;) secret until the fateful passing onwards.
The problem is, no matter what, this will necessarily be a continuous process. You need to remember that these things are in place and you need to keep track of your trusted friends' email addresses over time.
The problem is, what's useful and useless really isn't something that anybody cares about until it's too late. Remember the American Taliban? His random postings to the Usenet suddenly became interesting, even though, by rights, they weren't actually interesting until he started fighting for the other side.
Even a roughly-random selection of diaries and commentary is useful. Thousands of people hid out in Nazi-occupied countries. Many of them may have kept diaries, but Anne Frank's diary is the one that everybody thinks of. Would another person's diary be more or less interesting? Knowing what a selection of "people on the street" think of something is a great way to peer underneath the veneer of propaganda down the road.
FilmGimp a.k.a. CinePaint, is for a few specilized film editing applications, mostly to do with hand-rotoscoping, dust removal, and such. It is not a general purpose tool for video editing like Premiere or AfterEffects.
The problem is that even non-commercial spam falls into the "fire in a crowded theater" category of when free speach doesn't hold. That is, because it's been growing nearly-unchecked, it has the real possibility of destabilizing networks and causing a flood of traffic that is still filtered out.
Well, that, and commercial speach isn't free speech. Really, people misinterpreting the whole freedom-of-speech issue is one of those things that makes me want to cause bodily harm.
Really, this case has nothing to do with the legality of SPAM. SpamCop is listing OptInRealBig because it falls within their definition of Spam, not because it is illegal. This is no different than somebody suing the BBB because they have a bad record with them.
Re:He CAN-SPAM... the law says so!
on
Spammer Sues SpamCop
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You certianly have an interesting view of things.
In fact, the biggest problem is that the entire spam industry has made next to no good-faith efforts to legitimize itself. OptInRealBig isn't helping.
I have found, based on experiments on my wepbage (explicitly denied *all* spiders by a robots.txt file, unique email address every time it is spidered, etc) that spammers do still spider addresses, opting out does not work, even if the site claims that they comply with YOU-CAN-SPAM. They all claim that I "opted in" by submitting my name to a "FFA" site or crap like that in the bottom of the message.
I did, at one point, get some information about how a spammer got my address. They admitted that they had purchased it from somebody else, who then claimed that I allowed them to because I forgot to click a checkbox on a third company's website several years prior, but wouldn't say who sold it.
Which, if you think about it, is bunk. If permission is that vaccuous, then giving one site permission, you are really giving every single spammer permission, because they can sell said permission freely. And they don't even need to drop you. If company A sells permission to company B and C, if OptInRealBig has purchased permission from company B and you opt out, they can simply obtain permission from company C and continue to spam. So it's pretty clear that YOU-CAN-SPAM isn't going to work, even if they manage to prosecute a few spammers here and there.
See, the big thing here is that SpamCop does not really need to concern itself with YOU-CAN-SPAM in the slightest. YOU-CAN-SPAM uses the term "Spam" but does not create a legal definition of it. Thus, SpamCop can create their own definition of what spam is, and list mailers that violate that. This is similar to how the BBB creates a list of companies who violate their definition of good business. So there's nothing "legally" wrong with creating a list of mailers who buy lists from others and mass-mail them. You can even call it a list of "spammers" and sell it. Which is what this case is really about. As long as SpamCop sticks to their definition of what spam is, there's no real case that can be made.
OTOH, if you boss reads BOFH, it might just be because he's a brother-in-arms against the forces of corporate stupidity.
My boss doesn't read BOFH, but he does read Dilbert. At one point, he forwarded me a URL of a mean stunt that was being pulled on the boss and told me to not get any ideas.
Actually, failures in punch cards aren't going to happen fully randomly. The whole problem with the Florida ballots was that there's a flaw in the machine and certain positions were likely to be blocked by an accumulation of chad, which therefore make it impossible for the voter to properly punch the hole. This is somewhat mitigated by how they randomly shuffled the positions at different precincts.
The nice thing, however, is that once you create a standard for what rationally constitutes an intent by the voter to vote one way, you can always re-run the vote to check.
The part that was sticky in Florida was that there's no legal standard for what constituted the "intent" of the voter. Some ballots will always end up being poorly punched, just because people are stupid; there's nothing that can be done about that. However, if none of the holes are punched except for one dented hole on the card, it's pretty damn likely that they intended to properly punch that hole. If one hole is hanging and one hole is punched, it's pretty damn likely that the one where the hole is punched was intended.
I personally prefer the mark-sense systems because they can be electronically scanned just like punched cards, except they require even cheaper voting stations (i.e. a table with a privacy screen) and make the intent of the voter clearer.
Because there's considerable proof that scientific-based medicine works, whereas there's very little that most forms of chiropractic medicine do much of anything that massage and physical therapy don't do. This is actually causing problems for Chiropractors because the physical therapists have figured out where some of the techniques can be applied and have been using them in a legitimate clinic where you won't be sold snake oil and given treatments that, at best, do nothing, and have been shown to cause strokes.
The problem is that there are a few good chiropractors out there. But, as a whole, they are either out for money, or are inadvertently selling you treatment that doesn't work. Chriopractors, like spammers, have acquired the reputation of scammer.
And the problem is that the "points out of alignment" as you say is a crock. If you give 10 chiropractors the same X-ray, each one will point out mutually contradictory subluxations and pinched nerves and stuff.
I actually managed to lick my hand problem, long-term with some advice from my old doc. He showed me a simple set of wrist exercises, suggested a few things, and I'm fine. Which is cheaper than manipulations and a new bed.
Go through the trouble. Also note that it'll be real easy to get a more egronomic chair/keyboard/etc. if the doc says you need it.
Don't screw around with your hands. If you catch things early, you'll need to do splints, advil, exercises, and maybe "physical therapy" or whatnot, make a few minor changes (like working the wrists and arms out) and go on with life. Let it fester and get worse, you'll need to find something that doesn't involve your hands and/or get surgery that can only help so much.
You may want to casually mention it to a slightly-less-uptight doc under the context of a routine physical. It may be that you need to do a few things here and there and end up perfectly fine.
Better analogy: The shuttle is an 18 wheeler built by Ferrari. The SS1 is a custom touring motorcycle made out of fancy materials.
Neither one's going to be practical for dropping off a cake at grandma's, but they are both neat toys. It's just that the touring motorcycle is a lot cheaper to take out for a joyride.
I think you are too generous to the average joe. (Incidentally, statements like this end up with "...and this is why you should elect me dictator of the world" most of the time)
The problem is that the $499 mailing list is only one of the spam scams. Sure, it's a pyramid scam, but Herbalife and Amway are still in business and they are pretty damn near a pyramid scam.
People *do* buy into other spams. People are buying astonishing amounts of Oxycontin, Vicodin, Viagra, etc. through shady online sources and spam. People are continuing to get caught in advance-fee-fraud scams. A cow-orker of mine got a cell from a junk faxer (and lived to regret it)
The problem is, it only takes a few people per marketing blast to make it worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, they passed the point of no return a while back.
If SCO gives up, they have lost and will go out of business rather quickly. They are not going to be able to settle so easily with IBM because IBM's out for blood.
If SCO plods on, they are most likely to lose. But there's some chance for them to win.
It's also the case that, even if they aren't doing a pump-n-dump on the stock, they are still getting paid huge amounts of money and will continue to do so as long as the company is a operating concern. If they give up, that happens relatively quickly. If they plod along, as long as they can avoid a ruling, they can still get paid.
I think you are confusing putting something that you have *some* experience on, even if it's not especially substantial (padding), with putting something that you have *no* experience on (lying). But that's OK, because I didn't give an actual definition for "padding".
What I forgive somewhat is padding, not outright lying. If somebody puts Java on their resume, I'd expect them to at least be able to explain a little bit about it, maybe talking about interfaces, inner classes, etc. Perhaps they screwed around with it at home for a while, or made some sort of one-off tool with it at their last job so they could have that extra buzzword on their resume. That's what I'm getting at.
Yeah, he does have his bias. ;) I mostly suggested it because it's the only time I've heard anybody cover such things.
Amusingly enough, the most balanced pre-college history education I ever had was at my Catholic high school.
Don't know what your experience is, but life showed me that you can't quantify people.
I've seen folks with a BS or even an MS from great schools who couldn't code their way out of a box. I've seen bright folks who had such obnoxious personalities that nobody wants to work with them. I've seen folks with a PhD in random off-the-wall fields with no "useful" degrees who can both code well and manage people. I've seen grads from great schools with no common sense. I've seen folks who didn't graduate and got a plum job and then had problem years down the road when they were trying to find a new job and the market wasn't the same as before so they couldn't. I've torn apart folks in an interview because they didn't know anything about the words they stuffed in their resume. I've seen excellent artists getting in trouble in art schools because they didn't stretch their own canvas or used computers or such things.
There could be a variety of reasons why your brothers are doing better than you are other than education.
See, there's a difference between "padding your resume with keywords" and a fake degree. One's trying to defeat the keyword filter in an HR system, the other is outright lying.
The problem with your opinion is that there are some folks who didn't graduate from HS, College, or both who have made millions. Bill Gates is one of them. But, on the average, a dropout isn't going to make as much money as somebody who got the BS. But that doesn't mean that the other 99.9% of folks who didn't "finish their education" are particularly brilliant.
By drawing a sharp line between a PhD and a grade school education, you are confusing the issue. Most businesses don't care about a PhD, they generally care about folks with a bachleurs or a masters and that's about it.
An accredited degree, in theory, has somebody checking up on them to make sure that the life experience is really valid if it's used. Generally most accredited schools will still make you pass tests to make sure that you know the stuff. Otherwise, they lose accreditation and nobody takes them seriously.
Honarary degrees are similarly interesting. It's usually a given that they require a lot of approval from the various professors, who are snooty enough to not give a degree to just anybody. And also, if a school gives out too many dumb honorary degrees, nobody takes them seriously.
So there's generally some sort of checks to make sure that this doesn't get majorly out of hand.
You definately need to also read
Lies my Teacher Told Me while you are at it.
The problem is that even if teachers were to want to change things, there's too many other forces at work tying their hands. Because if they don't use computers, somehow kids will not be able to catch up to students in India, Japan, Europe, etc. or be able to take advantage of computers. If the principal or superintendant doesn't get unhappy, the parents will.
The really stupid thing is that computer use is really starting to be culturally indocrinated, so teaching kids how to computer really isn't as important as it used to be.
Actually, making a proper film projector that doesn't break the film, plays it back at the proper rate, etc. isn't trivial.
You've got two options. If you store things on most forms of digital media, you are not guaranteed a long media lifespan, but when you copy the data, you don't lose anything.
If you have analog media, like film or paper, you have a slightly longer window of opportunity when your media is degrading, but it's also problematic. Remember, an incredible percentage of the litarary output since the 19th century has been printed on wood-base paper that is slowly decaying. Folks didn't realize until much more recently that this was happening. Movie film requires incredibly expensive freezer storage or else it decays pretty rapidly. And you can't make lossless copies, every time you copy it, you lose something.
The problem is that archival media isn't. It's just media that decays a little slower than otherwise, but it all requires care. It either requires a team of librarians who protect relatively massive low-tech storage of information, or it requires a well thought-out digital system.
The digital system is actually not that hard. You just need to accept that you need a building stuffed with hard disks, plus a backup building of hard disks. The reason why so many old files aren't readable isn't necessarily because the creators did stupid things, it's because they packed them efficently and didn't wory about what would happen when they were gone, generally because they figured their system would be replaced with something better.
The biggest thing is that the easiest files to read are the ones that nobody wants to store because they are so huge. If you scanned an image 20 years ago and saved it as a simple bitmap and had an accompanying description that explained that it was x pixels by y pixels, with a specific color depth and pixel format, with a specific reference primary, etc. it will be pretty easy to read it. If you stored it in some weird compressed format, say an Apple II HGR screendump, where the format requires special interpretation, and don't include documentation on the format, etc. then it's pretty hard to read. If I store a database dump in the AppleWorks GS database format, I won't be able to read it. If I stored it as a CSV file or a text file or an XML file and include explanations of the fields, it's still readable.
The problem is, storing it in a future-proof way is going to take up a lot more space because you don't want to use any sort of nifty encodings or compression. Hence a building full of drives.
Similarly, you can avoid decay if you pay attention. You can't just put a CD-R on a shelf and expect it to last 100 years. You need to be able to verify that a drive is still functioning properly and replace it when it fails. You need to be able to upgrade the servers every few years so that they are still able to interface with the rest of the world. Like keeping paper media around, this requires care.
The thing is, eventually your analog media will die, no matter how well you take care of it, no matter how careful you are. So you need to copy, except that every copy you make of analog media involves loss.
Actually, most of the modern microbroadcasters make extra-sure that they don't interfere with existing stations. Most folks can't afford enough power to broadcast over an existing station. The vandals who try to replace signals (best known by the "Max Headrom" prankster) are a seperate group of folks.
I'm not on the streets protesting for them, but the microbroadcasters have a pretty good point. The NAB has, more or less, done nothing but lie to congress to try to protect the interests of the big companies. The problem is when the FCC spends too much time protecting corporate interests and not enough time protecting *our* interests.
The thing is, I think the technology-independent prepetual storage device isn't particularly important. Really, you just need to preserve for a relatively long span of time the ability to play stuff back. The interesting part about the evolution in optical formats has been the drive to have stuff in the CD-sized disk. So a DVD drive can read CDs as well and can handle a multitude of different application formats. Notice that the WORM and MD drives didn't catch on, but CD-R and CD-RW drives did. All of the next standard formats will have enough of the origional CD and DVD standards in them to make it so that your old media will work in the new player.
Besides, if we can get the media biz off of the DRM crack-pipe, you'll just stuff it all onto your massive multi-terabyte hard drive down the road.
I don't mind that my CDs may rot that much, as long as I'm allowed to back them up onto new media. Folks have been faced with that problem many times. My parents would always buy a record and then copy it to a cassette tape because they wanted to keep the record in good condition.
I don't think your idea to be able to sell rights to a song or movie, independent of format, will fly, either. You end up destroying the incentive for the creator of the media to offer a better format in the first place unless it was hideously expensive, such that you'd only do that for your favorite movies or songs.
I'd disagree. You are mixing the groupthink anti-corporate and anti-spam bias together and calling it an anti-marketing bias. I think most folks are not against marketing, they are against marketing that is more annoying than useful.
The problem is that Victoria's Secret needs to chose carefully each person they send out the catalog to. If they don't get leads from their customers, they don't send catalogs. So it's a self-regulating process that tries to get catalogs in front of people who might be interested.
The problem is that email advertising, to date, hasn't been selective. If the merchants had to spend a few dollars making sure somebody is interested in something, we'd not be complaining. But it's cheaper to annoy most of the 'net than it is to actually target the advertisements.
The biggest problem with this pay-to-advertise system is that it really screws with the little guy (a.k.a. your obscure Bug shop in Tampa Bay) because they are probably not prepared to put up a $20,000 cash bond in order to do business. Which really destroys one of the central advantages of the Internet -- the ability of the little guy to attract audiences they wouldn't otherwise.
The other big thing is that if you really do care about your Bug or thong lingerie, you'd probably end up going to an impartial review site (the bug equivelent of ArsTechnica or AnandTech or whatnot) or typing it into Google, not simply by reading your email.
I think that the best way is how everything else works...
;) secret until the fateful passing onwards.
With one's will, there's a trusted friend to execute it.
You can do better with electronic media. Maintain a list of a select few friends who are to "verify" that you are dead. Bonus points would be to have pieces of the encryption key to the "file'o'fun" distributed to said few friends, such that the contents of your final message, which will probably include passwords and hidden directories containing pr0n,
The problem is, no matter what, this will necessarily be a continuous process. You need to remember that these things are in place and you need to keep track of your trusted friends' email addresses over time.
See, that's both over- and under-enlightened.
The problem is, what's useful and useless really isn't something that anybody cares about until it's too late. Remember the American Taliban? His random postings to the Usenet suddenly became interesting, even though, by rights, they weren't actually interesting until he started fighting for the other side.
Even a roughly-random selection of diaries and commentary is useful. Thousands of people hid out in Nazi-occupied countries. Many of them may have kept diaries, but Anne Frank's diary is the one that everybody thinks of. Would another person's diary be more or less interesting? Knowing what a selection of "people on the street" think of something is a great way to peer underneath the veneer of propaganda down the road.
Not the way you think...
FilmGimp a.k.a. CinePaint, is for a few specilized film editing applications, mostly to do with hand-rotoscoping, dust removal, and such. It is not a general purpose tool for video editing like Premiere or AfterEffects.
The problem is that even non-commercial spam falls into the "fire in a crowded theater" category of when free speach doesn't hold. That is, because it's been growing nearly-unchecked, it has the real possibility of destabilizing networks and causing a flood of traffic that is still filtered out.
Well, that, and commercial speach isn't free speech. Really, people misinterpreting the whole freedom-of-speech issue is one of those things that makes me want to cause bodily harm.
Really, this case has nothing to do with the legality of SPAM. SpamCop is listing OptInRealBig because it falls within their definition of Spam, not because it is illegal. This is no different than somebody suing the BBB because they have a bad record with them.
You certianly have an interesting view of things.
In fact, the biggest problem is that the entire spam industry has made next to no good-faith efforts to legitimize itself. OptInRealBig isn't helping.
I have found, based on experiments on my wepbage (explicitly denied *all* spiders by a robots.txt file, unique email address every time it is spidered, etc) that spammers do still spider addresses, opting out does not work, even if the site claims that they comply with YOU-CAN-SPAM. They all claim that I "opted in" by submitting my name to a "FFA" site or crap like that in the bottom of the message.
I did, at one point, get some information about how a spammer got my address. They admitted that they had purchased it from somebody else, who then claimed that I allowed them to because I forgot to click a checkbox on a third company's website several years prior, but wouldn't say who sold it.
Which, if you think about it, is bunk. If permission is that vaccuous, then giving one site permission, you are really giving every single spammer permission, because they can sell said permission freely. And they don't even need to drop you. If company A sells permission to company B and C, if OptInRealBig has purchased permission from company B and you opt out, they can simply obtain permission from company C and continue to spam. So it's pretty clear that YOU-CAN-SPAM isn't going to work, even if they manage to prosecute a few spammers here and there.
See, the big thing here is that SpamCop does not really need to concern itself with YOU-CAN-SPAM in the slightest. YOU-CAN-SPAM uses the term "Spam" but does not create a legal definition of it. Thus, SpamCop can create their own definition of what spam is, and list mailers that violate that. This is similar to how the BBB creates a list of companies who violate their definition of good business. So there's nothing "legally" wrong with creating a list of mailers who buy lists from others and mass-mail them. You can even call it a list of "spammers" and sell it. Which is what this case is really about. As long as SpamCop sticks to their definition of what spam is, there's no real case that can be made.
OTOH, if you boss reads BOFH, it might just be because he's a brother-in-arms against the forces of corporate stupidity.
My boss doesn't read BOFH, but he does read Dilbert. At one point, he forwarded me a URL of a mean stunt that was being pulled on the boss and told me to not get any ideas.
Actually, failures in punch cards aren't going to happen fully randomly. The whole problem with the Florida ballots was that there's a flaw in the machine and certain positions were likely to be blocked by an accumulation of chad, which therefore make it impossible for the voter to properly punch the hole. This is somewhat mitigated by how they randomly shuffled the positions at different precincts.
The nice thing, however, is that once you create a standard for what rationally constitutes an intent by the voter to vote one way, you can always re-run the vote to check.
The part that was sticky in Florida was that there's no legal standard for what constituted the "intent" of the voter. Some ballots will always end up being poorly punched, just because people are stupid; there's nothing that can be done about that. However, if none of the holes are punched except for one dented hole on the card, it's pretty damn likely that they intended to properly punch that hole. If one hole is hanging and one hole is punched, it's pretty damn likely that the one where the hole is punched was intended.
I personally prefer the mark-sense systems because they can be electronically scanned just like punched cards, except they require even cheaper voting stations (i.e. a table with a privacy screen) and make the intent of the voter clearer.
No, Niven *did* cross the Kzin over to the Trek universe with the animated series.
;)
He turned down somebody writing a fanfic to do it, based on prior experience with Kzinti fanfic.
Because there's considerable proof that scientific-based medicine works, whereas there's very little that most forms of chiropractic medicine do much of anything that massage and physical therapy don't do. This is actually causing problems for Chiropractors because the physical therapists have figured out where some of the techniques can be applied and have been using them in a legitimate clinic where you won't be sold snake oil and given treatments that, at best, do nothing, and have been shown to cause strokes.
The problem is that there are a few good chiropractors out there. But, as a whole, they are either out for money, or are inadvertently selling you treatment that doesn't work. Chriopractors, like spammers, have acquired the reputation of scammer.
And the problem is that the "points out of alignment" as you say is a crock. If you give 10 chiropractors the same X-ray, each one will point out mutually contradictory subluxations and pinched nerves and stuff.
I actually managed to lick my hand problem, long-term with some advice from my old doc. He showed me a simple set of wrist exercises, suggested a few things, and I'm fine. Which is cheaper than manipulations and a new bed.
The problem is that it's only a matter of time before you have left hand problems.....
Go through the trouble. Also note that it'll be real easy to get a more egronomic chair/keyboard/etc. if the doc says you need it.
Don't screw around with your hands. If you catch things early, you'll need to do splints, advil, exercises, and maybe "physical therapy" or whatnot, make a few minor changes (like working the wrists and arms out) and go on with life. Let it fester and get worse, you'll need to find something that doesn't involve your hands and/or get surgery that can only help so much.
You may want to casually mention it to a slightly-less-uptight doc under the context of a routine physical. It may be that you need to do a few things here and there and end up perfectly fine.
Better analogy: The shuttle is an 18 wheeler built by Ferrari. The SS1 is a custom touring motorcycle made out of fancy materials.
Neither one's going to be practical for dropping off a cake at grandma's, but they are both neat toys. It's just that the touring motorcycle is a lot cheaper to take out for a joyride.
It's interesting in that this has the potential to create far more outrage than simply outsourcing.
I think you are too generous to the average joe. (Incidentally, statements like this end up with "...and this is why you should elect me dictator of the world" most of the time)
The problem is that the $499 mailing list is only one of the spam scams. Sure, it's a pyramid scam, but Herbalife and Amway are still in business and they are pretty damn near a pyramid scam.
People *do* buy into other spams. People are buying astonishing amounts of Oxycontin, Vicodin, Viagra, etc. through shady online sources and spam. People are continuing to get caught in advance-fee-fraud scams. A cow-orker of mine got a cell from a junk faxer (and lived to regret it)
The problem is, it only takes a few people per marketing blast to make it worthwhile.