It's rare that I see a post of blatant fear mongering lies such as this one.
I don't see myself as spreading fear. When I first became sexually active, I was in fear from the media and whatnot about AIDS. Its interesting in that I know plenty of people that have sex, heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual, yet none of them have AIDS, nor have I heard of anyone getting AIDS from any of the 4 universities that I have worked for or attended, nor from any of the businesses I have worked for. Not a friend of a friend. Not anyone besides a few (very few) celebrities. To me, it would seem that AIDS would be much more prevalent since it has an incubation period of up to 10 years or so.
"untreatable" There are many drugs and treatments available on the market. Ask your doctor! Remember AZT? Maybe interferon boosters? Try going to Google and searching on "aids treatment" for once eh?
I didn't know that this was controversial in any way shape or form. I guess my word choice was not the best, I guess a better word would be "uncurable". From what I've seen and read, people that undergo AIDS treatment are still pretty sick people. Regarding AZT (from wikopedia):
AZT does not destroy the HIV infection, but only delays the progression of the disease and the replication of virus, even at very high doses. During prolonged AZT treatment the HI-virus has the ability to gain an increased resistance to AZT by mutation of the reverse transcriptase. A study showed that AZT could not impede the resumption of virus production, and eventually cells treated with AZT produced viruses as much as the untreated cells.
In 1991, Public Citizen filed a lawsuit claiming that the AZT/Zidovudine patent was invalid. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in 1994 in favour of Glaxo Smith Kline. In 2002, another lawsuit was filed over the patent (which is due to expire in 2005) by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
AZT is also the source of another controversy; there are some who claim that AZT in fact causes AIDS, not HIV. This sort of claim found itself easy to gain currency in the late 1980s and early 1990s before it became widely known that AIDS was actually considerably more widespread in Africa, where most of its victims have never seen penicillin, let alone AZT.
Yeah, I remember AZT.
By your reasoning, there would be no relation to your mom walking down the street licking DOG FECES to her getting stomach and intestinal bacterial infections all the time.
I've told my mom about that. She just won't listen.
Also, by your same reasoning. People would get AIDS all the time. I'm not gay, but I at least try real hard to get every girl up the poop shoot. I will refuse sex if I have to use a condom, and I will change my behavior as soon as there is any tangible credible reason for me to do so.
Next, I guess you are going to say you still support the cold war, because there are still crazy commies out there, right?
Industrial Hemp and marijuana are different plants. You tell whether industrial hemp growers are growing marijuana in the same way you tell whether any other piece of farmland in the U.S. is growing marijuana.
Its much more complicated than that.
1st hemp legislation is blocked by established companies, mainly paper companies. Companies don't like any rock to their status quo. Just like the zinc industry pitches a bitch every time the thought of doing away with the worthless penny comes up. (Prior to that 1982, pennies were 95% Copper and 5% zinc.. After 1982 the composition became 97.6% zinc and 2.4% copper. Yet the zinc people act as if zinc was always in pennies).
Also, one of the reasons hemp is pushed so hard, is because stoners push it. "Normal" people could care less. Hemp and marijuana being illegal are both BS. Hemp is illegal to grow because its illegal to grow marijuana. The US used to be covered in hemp. When they 1st proposed making marijuana illegal, many people laughed saying it was as difficult as making oak or pine trees illegal, but somehow it got passed and all of the hemp was killed off. Hemp products are legal in the US, you just can't grow them. And it would be _very_ difficult to tell the difference between a hemp field and a marijuana field. And if hemp were legal and marijuana illegal, people would plant hemp all over the place for camoflage for growing marijuana, because hemp will grow wild anywhere with no maintenance or care needed.
We need to keep pushing the hemp issue... Vote libertarian (or at least vote).
Just for fun, here's a photo of the virus: http://www.avert.org/pictures/hivvirus6.htm
Interesting, I wonder what the whole "virus isolation" thing is all about. I'm by no way an expert in this field, but it said something to me when noone was able to pick up the cash for the isolation of the virus. Are the requirements for isolating the virus as defined on that page BS or what?
"Marketing", in its highest and most useful form, involves getting into the heads of your customers and understanding what they need before they know it themselves.
I don't call that "Marketing" I call that "Innovation".
"Marketing", in its highest and most useful form, involves getting into the heads of their potential customers and pushes what they don't need onto them.
I can't find a good link for it (can someone help with this?). But one of the most sucessful marketing campaigns was the Ginsu knives from the '70s. I believe it was two young guys that spent months getting this catchy advertisement together, and spent big bucks to get it into shape, and then they had to go to somewhere in Asia and find some cheap knife for the "product". Actually, that reminds me of how Microsoft got started as well.
Yeah, its interesting/amusing what gets classified as an epidemic. AIDS is an epidemic where there are ~ 42 million people living with it (tested positive for the HIV virus, not necessarily sick or whatever), and ~ 3.1 million people die from it annually.
TB is _not_ an epidemic, but it infects an estimated 8.7 million people a year and kills 2 million a year despite widespread control efforts.
Some 6600 people have contracted SARS worldwide, and that _is_ an epidemic.
Influenza (flu) is said to be a seasonally epidemic kinda thing where about 20,000 people die a year, but thats not scary enough for the news (although they pushed it last winter in the US a little). Its not too exciting, because most (90%) of the people that die are over 65. It was a "big epidemic" in 1918 when 500,000 people died from it.
AIDS is the best. Its an untreatable/uncurable disease that is supposedly spread by contact with fluids such as blood or sex goo. We've all been told that "AIDS does not discrimiate", but it does! In the US, its mostly black gay men (and some IV drug users) that get it, whereas in Africa its black heterosexual women that get it. After 20 years and I'm guessing millions if not billions of dollars in research have not even provided any kind of explanation of AIDS nor has the virus even been isolated.
here is some more causes of death info, here is more death info. Its interesting because the last link because it puts wars, random human-to-human violence, drowning, traffic accidents, and diarrhea above AIDS.
Also, I belive that suicide is somewhere in the top 20 causes of death _across all age groups_ in the US, but noone cares about that.
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Actualy, a really cool feature of the Safari (Mac OS X) web browser is that you can right click (or control-click for those still with one button) and correct the spelling in any form field on any website. A feature that I have been wanting in _all_ applications for a long time.
They were founded by the same guy. They both use the same webserver, and are virtual hosted by the same domain (http://www.valueweb.net/), and both have pretty cheesy webpages with the same redirect from the default index page to a/pages/1/index.htm and they both have the same "web designer" in the HTML source -- Lynwood H. Moore Jr. Plus, its just a pet peeve of mine when people cant spell HTML:)
Also, the membership does not seem that difficult. Any reasonably bright person/educated can get one of the required scores on at least one of the tests (at least for the TOPS, the scores for the OIAT are a little tougher).
Hey, if you send me $30, I'll give you a piece of paper that will say anything you want:)
I remember Kryptonite locks have a manufacturer's guarantee against thief. Is this covered? If someone's bike gets stolen, would they replacec it still?
The purpose of a lock is to keep honest and semi-honest people from taking your stuff.
No its not. An honest person does not steal people's bikes. A "semi-honest" person, I dunno.
The purpose of all locks and security measures are to make it more difficult to steal stuff. The value of the stuff is roughly proportional to the complexity of the lock. The lock on my front door is not that big. The lock on Fort Knox is probably much bigger.
If you're going to drive fancy stuff, then you have to accept that you are going to be a target.
Or just take the insurance money. I used to be scared about theft of things that I had insured, and once my insurance agent told me that my car stereo was insured, I could give a fuck if its stolen.
* Allows them to preview high-quality, full length songs in the privacy of their homes
I have no data to support this, but my intuition tells me that very few music downloads are "previews" of something that they have never heard before.
If Adobe would get the message it would be great to have decent learning versions of their software for free.
Hmm, doesn't Adobe have free downloads of Acrobat reader? Doesn't Adobe have Photoshop elements? Most home users that download pirated versions of Photoshop don't want/know how to use 99% of the features.
Entertainment companies in particular are the undisputed champions of foot-dragging when it comes to the requests of their markets.
Hmm, lets consider porn for example. They embrace the p2p model, online lower quality downloads*, and they don't really need to advertise, and porn is a very profitable business.
What is different from porn and more mainstream entertainment?
Lots of timely high quality** material. The more mainstream entertainment industries simply cannot provide the supply of entertainment at the price that their customers can afford.
As far as the music industry goes, its a wierd business both from the business standpoint and that many of the artists are, well frankly, too stupid to think that the business model is a viable one. Look back over the past 50 years or so of rock music. Many of the most sucessful bands did not have chart topping albums or singles, and even those that do, and have long careers, the latter part of their carrers bring in money by touring, not by new albums.
Movies are just wierd now. In my opinion, the only decent movies in recent past were the Lord of the Rings movies, and those were in no way conventional movies. They had an established plot that was already written. All three of the movies were filmed at the same time. And they did not depend on a long list of namebrand actors and other personnel. Most other movies hype the movie with high dollar actors, directors, and producers, and sequel phenomenon, and plots from well known authors. These movie marketing techniques are sucessful in the same way that fast food restaurants are nationally sucessful. Noone expects to get a good meal from a fast food place, but they can expect a paletable meal that is just like every other meal that people have gotten from every fast food place anywhere else in the country.
* lower quality compared to DVD quality audio/video or magazine print
No. I don't have any specific conspiracy theory. I believe that most everyone will agree that it was a conspiracy of some kind, where most people believe that it was due to 19 Saudi hijackers and al queda. I guess I do have lots of time to think about one of the most significant events that has happened in my lifetime, and being that it has become either the number one or two issue for determining the next president of the united states. It seems as though this day will still have impact on me and others for years to come.
Anyway, I guess its just OK now. It was a long time ago. I'm sure that our air defense will not fail again like it did that day. We invaded Afghanastan and fixed that problem. We invaded Iraq just in case they might have have had weapons of mass destruction and maybe have had ties to terrorists. Neither cases have held up, but we have tought the world and all of the terrorists out there a lesson. Its clear that we are safer now, because every suicidal terrorist that is willing to sacrifice their lives to be with Allah is now scared because we might take their clothes off and chastise them.
I'll give you and everyone else the Greedo vs Han thing. We all agree that the changes to that scene are stupid, but I say give the guy a break with the rest.
We, I assume at least, are all pretty much computer geeks, and we look forward to the "latest and greatest" rehashes of the same old shit with software every day. I mean, damn, most of the GNU and OSS programs are "free" half featured reimplementations of decent commercial software.
Now if you actually compare or try to compare the StarWars rereleases to any other rerelease, well there is no comparison. Some big DVD rereleases include the Godfather trilogy, which I don't own nor have I seen it yet, but I have heard that the remix of the sound into 5.1 and the picture make it seem like a newly released movie. Another is the remix of the sound in things like Pink Floyd's the Wall, and Stone's Apocalypse Now. I have not heard a single complaint about these rereleases, actually only the opposite.
I personally liked the introduction of Jaba the Hutt in IV. I thought that was a nice tie in to the rest of the plot. I think the various scene wipes and additional critters and whatnot are great. It really fills out the movie. Also just the cleanup of the limitatations of budget and technology to make the special effects better are welcome by me as well. Lucas put quite a bit of time and money into enhancing these movies, much more than say the 20th aniversary release of Alien or Scarface, and certainly not as cheesy as what has happened to ET.
I'm not going to rush and buy them on Tuesday, but I will buy them, and millions of people will as well. Well I guess if people keep bitching for the release of the "originals", I would guess in due time Lucas might even do it and make more $$$. I would guess that more than one person would buy both the reworked versions and the orginals so they can say they have both.
Grandparent: Others will say, "Open source developers are more clued in to security issues due to a better sense of community, and their software is more secure as a result."
He's right. They may not be looking for security holes and they may not find them because of all the "eyeballs" but they will certainly fix them and release a patch to the community shortly after it is discovered.
Well, one thing I know that there are "eyeballs" not looking to _secure_ OSS code, but I guarantee you that there are "eyeballs" looking to _exploit_ OSS code. I can attest that the data speaks for itself that at least some closed source vendors do have significant security issues and some closed source vendors that have a definite lack of security issues. Again, by looking at the data I would put OSS somewhere inbetween "very secure" and "not secure" and more towards the "very secure" part of the spectrum.
I've run OSS on public IP addresses for at least 7 years now, and I have never been compromised. I honestly can attribute this to 3 things: 1) luck* 2) I'm a decent admin and 3) OSS is pretty secure.
* I say luck, because I have had known vulnerabilites in versions of software that I have run, but I have not had someone exploit that vulnerability before I updated the software.
Why make the taxpayers pay for cleaning up the internet of spam?
Apparently you don't know how much (assuming your from the US) we spend on incarcerating people here in the US. Its on order of $40,000 a year for your basic inmate, and we have the highest (AFAIK) percentage of our population in jail/prison than any other country.
I would gladly pay out of my pocket (not $100,00 I don't have that:) to get a spammer off of the 'net.
BTW, please call 1-800-884-9510 and say "you people suck". More info can be found at my previous post here.
What "void" is being filled by spammers? I can see the P2P "I wanna get stuff for free" void being filled, but I don't see any void filled by spammers.
BTW, please call 1-800-884-9510 and tell them that "they suck". More about this can be found in an earlier post by me here.
I turn in a dozen clearly fraudulent spams a month, which are blithely ignored by law enforcement.
Good for you. I try to at least do some preliminary investigation into spammers from time to time, but most of them are from overseas. I do report them to their registrars, but I think that these new cheaper registrars like the cash that spammers give them, because spammers buy domains in bulk and don't keep them too long.
People please take a minute today and call 1-800-884-9510 and just tell them that "you people suck".
Please use that phrase exactly, it will be powerful if they are phone slashdoted (and billed:) with the exact same phrase. When I told the woman who answered the phone that she replied "Well, thats too bad for you" and slammed the phone down. Apparently, I hit a nerve and at least that person does not like that phrase, so it seems like a good one:)
I just got off the phone with them. This was the 3rd time I have called them and asked them to stop sending me email. I have contacted the Attorney General's office in California, where they are located, and filed a SPAM complaint. This company is called Avtech Direct, some spammer/rippoff artist selling overpriced cheap computers, or at least collect money for overpriced cheap computers.
Also, at 2PM PST (5PM EST) "Chad" is supposed to come into work. He is supposedly "the man" that we need to talk to in order to really stop getting emails from these people. It would be OK for us to phone slashdot him as well, being that this is the only name I could get of someone higher up.
Please, lets at least put a hurting on these people today. It only takes a minute to phone them, and if we get one spammer off the 'net thats a good thing.
Name me one other product or service that asks people to pay extra for basically public information about their product or service? Now its common for people to pay extra to _fix_ problems via service contracts or extended warantees, but paying extra for the time of release of information and no action???
At the risk of sounding like a Microsoft apologist, I really don't see the big deal, here. It's not like they're releasing patches only to premium subscribers, they're providing earlier notice of what's going to be covered in the next security bulletin.
I can see this being irritating to customers who are unwilling to pay yet another Microsoft tax for early notification, but I don't see that it's some kind of horrible, evil practice, either.
I dunno. It seems to me that if Microsoft is going to take the time to write up a security bulletin, that it wouldn't be too tough for them to put the information on the web somewhere or make a press release. They do have a website don't they?
But, hey if people feel the need to pay extra for common information about a product that they pay for, I'd take their money too.
1st, I'd like to say that I'm not a Microsoft customer either personally or professionally, so these kinds of "problems" are not something I'm used to dealing with.
2nd, being that I don't know much about MS or really care, I checked my homepage preferences NOT TO SHOW WINDOWS topics, so don't blame me for what I'm writing below. I'm not supposed to even see this article on my frontpage, so here we go.
People, what is so "good" about windows so that they seem to think that it is OK to have spyware, viruses, crashes, breakins, spam drone zombie boxes, popups, reinstalls, driver issues, registry corruption, and service packs that oftentimes break things that used to just work? OK, I did think of one thing, because this is not what I use computers for -- games. Otherwise, I cannot see anything that the Windows platform does better than other platforms.
I simply do not get that putting people in front of a computer turns people into indiots that will take just about anything. We all have heard the if OSes were like cars or airlines jokes. But what would your average person do if their car or washermachine had these "problems" like their windows based computer has? They would sell the thing and get a better one.
The crazy thing is, I cannot even think of a single product that people pay for in life that has the magnatude of problems that Windows computers do. It seems as though people just think its OK in that one area of their life. Being that people know that I'm in computers, I get these computer questions. Very few are hardware related. All of the others are Windows problems, and I hate to be rude, but I tell them that these are windows problems, and they go away when you don't use windows.
And I bet that the people at Microsoft are laughing all the way to the bank. Now, they want people to pay more for a more reliable computing experience. It used to be that snake oil salesmen had to move from town to town. Microsoft hides in plain sight. I really bet that in 10 or 20 years from now, people are going to look back at "how bad computers were" and laugh, and wonder how they made it through those times.
Note: I do know some people that are computer professionals that dont have these windows problems, or at least only a couple of them, usually driver and service pack gotchas. But as far as "normal" people go, its common for people to have experienced at least 4 or 5 of the 10 things that I listed above.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see myself as spreading fear. When I first became sexually active, I was in fear from the media and whatnot about AIDS. Its interesting in that I know plenty of people that have sex, heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual, yet none of them have AIDS, nor have I heard of anyone getting AIDS from any of the 4 universities that I have worked for or attended, nor from any of the businesses I have worked for. Not a friend of a friend. Not anyone besides a few (very few) celebrities. To me, it would seem that AIDS would be much more prevalent since it has an incubation period of up to 10 years or so.
"untreatable" There are many drugs and treatments available on the market. Ask your doctor! Remember AZT? Maybe interferon boosters? Try going to Google and searching on "aids treatment" for once eh?
I didn't know that this was controversial in any way shape or form. I guess my word choice was not the best, I guess a better word would be "uncurable". From what I've seen and read, people that undergo AIDS treatment are still pretty sick people. Regarding AZT (from wikopedia):Yeah, I remember AZT.
By your reasoning, there would be no relation to your mom walking down the street licking DOG FECES to her getting stomach and intestinal bacterial infections all the time.
I've told my mom about that. She just won't listen.
Also, by your same reasoning. People would get AIDS all the time. I'm not gay, but I at least try real hard to get every girl up the poop shoot. I will refuse sex if I have to use a condom, and I will change my behavior as soon as there is any tangible credible reason for me to do so.
Next, I guess you are going to say you still support the cold war, because there are still crazy commies out there, right?
Industrial Hemp and marijuana are different plants. You tell whether industrial hemp growers are growing marijuana in the same way you tell whether any other piece of farmland in the U.S. is growing marijuana.
Its much more complicated than that.
1st hemp legislation is blocked by established companies, mainly paper companies. Companies don't like any rock to their status quo. Just like the zinc industry pitches a bitch every time the thought of doing away with the worthless penny comes up. (Prior to that 1982, pennies were 95% Copper and 5% zinc.. After 1982 the composition became 97.6% zinc and 2.4% copper. Yet the zinc people act as if zinc was always in pennies).
Also, one of the reasons hemp is pushed so hard, is because stoners push it. "Normal" people could care less. Hemp and marijuana being illegal are both BS. Hemp is illegal to grow because its illegal to grow marijuana. The US used to be covered in hemp. When they 1st proposed making marijuana illegal, many people laughed saying it was as difficult as making oak or pine trees illegal, but somehow it got passed and all of the hemp was killed off. Hemp products are legal in the US, you just can't grow them. And it would be _very_ difficult to tell the difference between a hemp field and a marijuana field. And if hemp were legal and marijuana illegal, people would plant hemp all over the place for camoflage for growing marijuana, because hemp will grow wild anywhere with no maintenance or care needed.
We need to keep pushing the hemp issue... Vote libertarian (or at least vote).
I would love to see a debate between Bush, Kerry, and Badnarik.
It would be interesting to hear Bush and Kerry make real answers to real issues instead of fingerpoint and talk about "terrorism" all the time.
Just for fun, here's a photo of the virus: http://www.avert.org/pictures/hivvirus6.htm
Interesting, I wonder what the whole "virus isolation" thing is all about. I'm by no way an expert in this field, but it said something to me when noone was able to pick up the cash for the isolation of the virus. Are the requirements for isolating the virus as defined on that page BS or what?
"Marketing", in its highest and most useful form, involves getting into the heads of your customers and understanding what they need before they know it themselves.
I don't call that "Marketing" I call that "Innovation".
"Marketing", in its highest and most useful form, involves getting into the heads of their potential customers and pushes what they don't need onto them.
I can't find a good link for it (can someone help with this?). But one of the most sucessful marketing campaigns was the Ginsu knives from the '70s. I believe it was two young guys that spent months getting this catchy advertisement together, and spent big bucks to get it into shape, and then they had to go to somewhere in Asia and find some cheap knife for the "product". Actually, that reminds me of how Microsoft got started as well.
Technology by definition _is_ understanding.
:)
However, most people don't understand that
Yeah, its interesting/amusing what gets classified as an epidemic. AIDS is an epidemic where there are ~ 42 million people living with it (tested positive for the HIV virus, not necessarily sick or whatever), and ~ 3.1 million people die from it annually.
TB is _not_ an epidemic, but it infects an estimated 8.7 million people a year and kills 2 million a year despite widespread control efforts.
Some 6600 people have contracted SARS worldwide, and that _is_ an epidemic.
Influenza (flu) is said to be a seasonally epidemic kinda thing where about 20,000 people die a year, but thats not scary enough for the news (although they pushed it last winter in the US a little). Its not too exciting, because most (90%) of the people that die are over 65. It was a "big epidemic" in 1918 when 500,000 people died from it.
AIDS is the best. Its an untreatable/uncurable disease that is supposedly spread by contact with fluids such as blood or sex goo. We've all been told that "AIDS does not discrimiate", but it does! In the US, its mostly black gay men (and some IV drug users) that get it, whereas in Africa its black heterosexual women that get it. After 20 years and I'm guessing millions if not billions of dollars in research have not even provided any kind of explanation of AIDS nor has the virus even been isolated.
here is some more causes of death info, here is more death info. Its interesting because the last link because it puts wars, random human-to-human violence, drowning, traffic accidents, and diarrhea above AIDS.
Also, I belive that suicide is somewhere in the top 20 causes of death _across all age groups_ in the US, but noone cares about that.
Greg,
:)
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Actualy, a really cool feature of the Safari (Mac OS X) web browser is that you can right click (or control-click for those still with one button) and correct the spelling in any form field on any website. A feature that I have been wanting in _all_ applications for a long time.
No, its not rocket science
I dunno, the TOPS http://www.toponesociety.com/ and the One-in-a-thousand http://www.oathsociety.com/ seem a little fishy to me.
/pages/1/index.htm and they both have the same "web designer" in the HTML source -- Lynwood H. Moore Jr. Plus, its just a pet peeve of mine when people cant spell HTML :)
:)
They were founded by the same guy. They both use the same webserver, and are virtual hosted by the same domain (http://www.valueweb.net/), and both have pretty cheesy webpages with the same redirect from the default index page to a
Also, the membership does not seem that difficult. Any reasonably bright person/educated can get one of the required scores on at least one of the tests (at least for the TOPS, the scores for the OIAT are a little tougher).
Hey, if you send me $30, I'll give you a piece of paper that will say anything you want
I remember Kryptonite locks have a manufacturer's guarantee against thief. Is this covered? If someone's bike gets stolen, would they replacec it still?
Depends on how Kryptonite defines guarantee.
The purpose of a lock is to keep honest and semi-honest people from taking your stuff.
No its not. An honest person does not steal people's bikes. A "semi-honest" person, I dunno.
The purpose of all locks and security measures are to make it more difficult to steal stuff. The value of the stuff is roughly proportional to the complexity of the lock. The lock on my front door is not that big. The lock on Fort Knox is probably much bigger.
If you're going to drive fancy stuff, then you have to accept that you are going to be a target.
Or just take the insurance money. I used to be scared about theft of things that I had insured, and once my insurance agent told me that my car stereo was insured, I could give a fuck if its stolen.
* Allows them to preview high-quality, full length songs in the privacy of their homes
I have no data to support this, but my intuition tells me that very few music downloads are "previews" of something that they have never heard before.
If Adobe would get the message it would be great to have decent learning versions of their software for free.
Hmm, doesn't Adobe have free downloads of Acrobat reader? Doesn't Adobe have Photoshop elements? Most home users that download pirated versions of Photoshop don't want/know how to use 99% of the features.
Entertainment companies in particular are the undisputed champions of foot-dragging when it comes to the requests of their markets.
:)
Hmm, lets consider porn for example. They embrace the p2p model, online lower quality downloads*, and they don't really need to advertise, and porn is a very profitable business.
What is different from porn and more mainstream entertainment?
Lots of timely high quality** material. The more mainstream entertainment industries simply cannot provide the supply of entertainment at the price that their customers can afford.
As far as the music industry goes, its a wierd business both from the business standpoint and that many of the artists are, well frankly, too stupid to think that the business model is a viable one. Look back over the past 50 years or so of rock music. Many of the most sucessful bands did not have chart topping albums or singles, and even those that do, and have long careers, the latter part of their carrers bring in money by touring, not by new albums.
Movies are just wierd now. In my opinion, the only decent movies in recent past were the Lord of the Rings movies, and those were in no way conventional movies. They had an established plot that was already written. All three of the movies were filmed at the same time. And they did not depend on a long list of namebrand actors and other personnel. Most other movies hype the movie with high dollar actors, directors, and producers, and sequel phenomenon, and plots from well known authors. These movie marketing techniques are sucessful in the same way that fast food restaurants are nationally sucessful. Noone expects to get a good meal from a fast food place, but they can expect a paletable meal that is just like every other meal that people have gotten from every fast food place anywhere else in the country.
* lower quality compared to DVD quality audio/video or magazine print
** high quality in terms of the "acting"
No. I don't have any specific conspiracy theory. I believe that most everyone will agree that it was a conspiracy of some kind, where most people believe that it was due to 19 Saudi hijackers and al queda. I guess I do have lots of time to think about one of the most significant events that has happened in my lifetime, and being that it has become either the number one or two issue for determining the next president of the united states. It seems as though this day will still have impact on me and others for years to come.
Anyway, I guess its just OK now. It was a long time ago. I'm sure that our air defense will not fail again like it did that day. We invaded Afghanastan and fixed that problem. We invaded Iraq just in case they might have have had weapons of mass destruction and maybe have had ties to terrorists. Neither cases have held up, but we have tought the world and all of the terrorists out there a lesson. Its clear that we are safer now, because every suicidal terrorist that is willing to sacrifice their lives to be with Allah is now scared because we might take their clothes off and chastise them.
Well, it looks like we only have 2 more months until SCOX is back to where it should be.
I'll give you and everyone else the Greedo vs Han thing. We all agree that the changes to that scene are stupid, but I say give the guy a break with the rest.
We, I assume at least, are all pretty much computer geeks, and we look forward to the "latest and greatest" rehashes of the same old shit with software every day. I mean, damn, most of the GNU and OSS programs are "free" half featured reimplementations of decent commercial software.
Now if you actually compare or try to compare the StarWars rereleases to any other rerelease, well there is no comparison. Some big DVD rereleases include the Godfather trilogy, which I don't own nor have I seen it yet, but I have heard that the remix of the sound into 5.1 and the picture make it seem like a newly released movie. Another is the remix of the sound in things like Pink Floyd's the Wall, and Stone's Apocalypse Now. I have not heard a single complaint about these rereleases, actually only the opposite.
I personally liked the introduction of Jaba the Hutt in IV. I thought that was a nice tie in to the rest of the plot. I think the various scene wipes and additional critters and whatnot are great. It really fills out the movie. Also just the cleanup of the limitatations of budget and technology to make the special effects better are welcome by me as well. Lucas put quite a bit of time and money into enhancing these movies, much more than say the 20th aniversary release of Alien or Scarface, and certainly not as cheesy as what has happened to ET.
I'm not going to rush and buy them on Tuesday, but I will buy them, and millions of people will as well. Well I guess if people keep bitching for the release of the "originals", I would guess in due time Lucas might even do it and make more $$$. I would guess that more than one person would buy both the reworked versions and the orginals so they can say they have both.
Better yet lets beat daddypants with a stick with every spam we get in our inbox and twice for every dup.
That will stop spam!
Grandparent: Others will say, "Open source developers are more clued in to security issues due to a better sense of community, and their software is more secure as a result."
He's right. They may not be looking for security holes and they may not find them because of all the "eyeballs" but they will certainly fix them and release a patch to the community shortly after it is discovered.
Well, one thing I know that there are "eyeballs" not looking to _secure_ OSS code, but I guarantee you that there are "eyeballs" looking to _exploit_ OSS code. I can attest that the data speaks for itself that at least some closed source vendors do have significant security issues and some closed source vendors that have a definite lack of security issues. Again, by looking at the data I would put OSS somewhere inbetween "very secure" and "not secure" and more towards the "very secure" part of the spectrum.
I've run OSS on public IP addresses for at least 7 years now, and I have never been compromised. I honestly can attribute this to 3 things: 1) luck* 2) I'm a decent admin and 3) OSS is pretty secure.
* I say luck, because I have had known vulnerabilites in versions of software that I have run, but I have not had someone exploit that vulnerability before I updated the software.
Why make the taxpayers pay for cleaning up the internet of spam?
:) to get a spammer off of the 'net.
Apparently you don't know how much (assuming your from the US) we spend on incarcerating people here in the US. Its on order of $40,000 a year for your basic inmate, and we have the highest (AFAIK) percentage of our population in jail/prison than any other country.
I would gladly pay out of my pocket (not $100,00 I don't have that
BTW, please call 1-800-884-9510 and say "you people suck". More info can be found at my previous post here.
What "void" is being filled by spammers? I can see the P2P "I wanna get stuff for free" void being filled, but I don't see any void filled by spammers.
BTW, please call 1-800-884-9510 and tell them that "they suck". More about this can be found in an earlier post by me here.
I turn in a dozen clearly fraudulent spams a month, which are blithely ignored by law enforcement.
:)
Good for you. I try to at least do some preliminary investigation into spammers from time to time, but most of them are from overseas. I do report them to their registrars, but I think that these new cheaper registrars like the cash that spammers give them, because spammers buy domains in bulk and don't keep them too long.
People please take a minute today and call 1-800-884-9510 and just tell them that "you people suck".
Please use that phrase exactly, it will be powerful if they are phone slashdoted (and billed:) with the exact same phrase. When I told the woman who answered the phone that she replied "Well, thats too bad for you" and slammed the phone down. Apparently, I hit a nerve and at least that person does not like that phrase, so it seems like a good one
I just got off the phone with them. This was the 3rd time I have called them and asked them to stop sending me email. I have contacted the Attorney General's office in California, where they are located, and filed a SPAM complaint. This company is called Avtech Direct, some spammer/rippoff artist selling overpriced cheap computers, or at least collect money for overpriced cheap computers.
Also, at 2PM PST (5PM EST) "Chad" is supposed to come into work. He is supposedly "the man" that we need to talk to in order to really stop getting emails from these people. It would be OK for us to phone slashdot him as well, being that this is the only name I could get of someone higher up.
Please, lets at least put a hurting on these people today. It only takes a minute to phone them, and if we get one spammer off the 'net thats a good thing.
telling premium customers three days earlier/I.
Name me one other product or service that asks people to pay extra for basically public information about their product or service? Now its common for people to pay extra to _fix_ problems via service contracts or extended warantees, but paying extra for the time of release of information and no action???
A fool and their money soon part company.
At the risk of sounding like a Microsoft apologist, I really don't see the big deal, here. It's not like they're releasing patches only to premium subscribers, they're providing earlier notice of what's going to be covered in the next security bulletin.
I can see this being irritating to customers who are unwilling to pay yet another Microsoft tax for early notification, but I don't see that it's some kind of horrible, evil practice, either.
I dunno. It seems to me that if Microsoft is going to take the time to write up a security bulletin, that it wouldn't be too tough for them to put the information on the web somewhere or make a press release. They do have a website don't they?
But, hey if people feel the need to pay extra for common information about a product that they pay for, I'd take their money too.
1st, I'd like to say that I'm not a Microsoft customer either personally or professionally, so these kinds of "problems" are not something I'm used to dealing with.
2nd, being that I don't know much about MS or really care, I checked my homepage preferences NOT TO SHOW WINDOWS topics, so don't blame me for what I'm writing below. I'm not supposed to even see this article on my frontpage, so here we go.
People, what is so "good" about windows so that they seem to think that it is OK to have spyware, viruses, crashes, breakins, spam drone zombie boxes, popups, reinstalls, driver issues, registry corruption, and service packs that oftentimes break things that used to just work? OK, I did think of one thing, because this is not what I use computers for -- games. Otherwise, I cannot see anything that the Windows platform does better than other platforms.
I simply do not get that putting people in front of a computer turns people into indiots that will take just about anything. We all have heard the if OSes were like cars or airlines jokes. But what would your average person do if their car or washermachine had these "problems" like their windows based computer has? They would sell the thing and get a better one.
The crazy thing is, I cannot even think of a single product that people pay for in life that has the magnatude of problems that Windows computers do. It seems as though people just think its OK in that one area of their life. Being that people know that I'm in computers, I get these computer questions. Very few are hardware related. All of the others are Windows problems, and I hate to be rude, but I tell them that these are windows problems, and they go away when you don't use windows.
And I bet that the people at Microsoft are laughing all the way to the bank. Now, they want people to pay more for a more reliable computing experience. It used to be that snake oil salesmen had to move from town to town. Microsoft hides in plain sight. I really bet that in 10 or 20 years from now, people are going to look back at "how bad computers were" and laugh, and wonder how they made it through those times.
Note: I do know some people that are computer professionals that dont have these windows problems, or at least only a couple of them, usually driver and service pack gotchas. But as far as "normal" people go, its common for people to have experienced at least 4 or 5 of the 10 things that I listed above.
So remind me again why I feel compelled to use ssh and https for all of my "secure" communications?