They don't? I guess you built the road you drive on yourself, personally arrested any criminals who might have accosted you during the journey, and convinced everyone to respect private property so your company could exist in the first place.
And printed the money that you are paid with, and most importantly, you made and enforced the laws to ensure that the company that you work for will actually pay you for your work, have decent conditions at work including the number of hours and all of that.
Yes, I'm as anti-governemnt as anybody, but I'm more anti-selfish dickhead more, and the government keeps those people and themselves pretty much in check.
They attack this problem in Australia (and other places) by taxing the organiser of the lottery, all advertised prizes are for the "after tax" value, if it says "First prize: $1M" and you win, you get $1M.
I am not a government expert, but from what I hear and gather, the Australian government is simply better than the US government.
Yes, advertised prizes should be after tax. Another thing that Australia has done recently that the US probably never will is to do away with rider bills.
Its very frustrating to live in the country with arguably the best constitution ever written and have it treated as merely a historical document since WWII or the 60s however you look at it.
I'm thinking of creating a bumper sticker for the next presidential election that says something like "Please vote for a president that will uphold the constitution", but something like that might get me arrested and probably would go above 99% of the people's heads.
I do too. This is a very mature and wise decision for Adobe to make.
I know now that I was wrong, but I did not care for PDFs for years. And still to this day I have issues with people that don't do them correctly (basically those that put a bunch of huge images into a PDF container).
But with the advent of Linux and especially OS X being able to create PDFs so easily, and I can share documents with anybody and have them look like they are supposed to look is very nice.
Although I would have prefered if this was an open spec with quality PDF generators from day one, 10 years or so of progress to that ultimate goal is not bad in the long run.
This model should be _the_ standard for propriatary data formats. By that, I mean going from propriatary to an open standard if it cannot be an open standard from the beginning. Autodesk, MS, etc, I'm looking at you for adopting such a respectable decision for document formats.
"Any commercial Internet site or online service that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors"
Since when is a preview of educational material harmful to minors?
OK, to be more blunt, since when is random consensual sexual acts between legal adults in the country of Sealand harmful to minors in Kentucky, USA?
The fist time I saw this kind of stuff as a minor, the only way I was harmed was that my wee-wee got stiff. Actually, at that age it got stiff for unknown reasons as well.
Has anyone actually investigated whether the XXX industry actually WANTS the tld?
First, TLDs are a good idea that simply do not work in reality. Proof of this is that slashdot.com and slashdot.org are exactly the same even though they have different TLDs. OK, that was a bad example, because a counter to that would be a few years ago with whitehouse.com vs whitehouse.gov.
The deal with the XXX domain is that it will be yet another gold rush for the "good ones" if it comes into existence, but then nothing will change. Porn will be typosquatted and littered all over the.com and other domains like it is now.
My point is that TLDs are ineffective in reality (but great in theory), and the XXX TLD would be great to help save the children (in theory), but the poor kids will see people fucking and sucking even if there is a XXX domain./rant
Since the phone is not subsidized, there *should* be no 2 year contract requirement.
What a concept. Actually make a product that people want, sell it to them at a fairly premium price, and to boot don't lock them with a service plan. This will bring the cell phone market upside down.
Why do consumers agree to 2 year contracts for a commodity service when the contract gains them nothing?
These kinds of agreements by consumers are really going to start screwing everybody real soon. Imagine when _ALL_ of your services come with contracts?
I begrudgingly signed a one year contract (lease) for an apartment when I didn't own a house, and that bothered me. But I would never sign an agreement to pay someone hundreds of dollars to stop using their shitty service. That makes no sense to me.
I don't see what is special about wikipedia, if I were a college professor, I would not accept any online references.
I use Google and wikipedia daily, and if I were back in college today, I would still use them to augment my research, but any bozo can put up a website and say anything they want.
Well, I amend my original statement about online references. You can reference this post:)
It has 6 to 10 digit numerical password. No special characters, no alphabets. Very simple authentication system. They should know that they will attract phishers and scammers like honey draws the bees.
Phishers and scammers are not detered by "strong" passwords.
Asking for and receiving a password via phishing or scamming is just as easy for a password that is one character between and a million characters. Even with special characters, upper lower case, whatever.
At home, with their parents who can teach them the importance of drinking responsibly while they are still at home.
The problem is with the parents/parenting to begin with.
Americans are pretty psychotic with respect to things like mistakes, moderation, and honest communication.
Instead of these things, we like harder rules and harder punishments. Things like zero tolerance, mandatory minimums, 3 strike rules, police roadblocks.
There is a saying that goes something like "The firmer grip you use, the faster the the stuff squirts between your fingers". This is what is happening.
I live in one of the most policed conservative states in the US, and it sucks. Trust me, once your "in the system" its next to impossible to get out of it.
spent almost a man year in total on trying to fix our software. It turns out that the south bridge is the problem.
and
We still picked a VIA one though (with a C7 and a 8237) because frankly, their prices are hard to beat.
Are mutually exclusive in my book, unless you are talking about a large volume of machines (~50+ something well beyond one or two).
Personally, I've been interested in getting a small computer for years, but I can't justify the price/performance + my time factor, so I just havn't bothered. Whenever I go to mini-itx.com and price something together, I scratch my head and ask why would I get something in about the Mac mini form factor with less capabilities than a mini that costs the same as a mini?
Granted, I havn't bought a mini either. I guess I'm just a glorified window shopper.
5) Cheaper to produce 6) Higher quality 7) Longer lasting
Funny how that when media gets cheaper to produce, higher quality and longer lasting that the prices go up, demand goes up, but supply is never in agreement with demand or price.
Most of the customers out there have 27" or smaller non-HD sets - the different in quality between DVD and HD-DVD/Blu-ray is negligible.
Actually, its zero. DVD resolution is SD. Content scaled to 480 scan lines is as good as the scaler, that is it.
I embraced the DVD thing. Smaller form factor, no rewinding. Still frames. Higher resolution, better sound. I was happy.
Well, what happened?
I got a nice HDTV, and DVD quality simply does not cut it anymore.
An upgrade in formats is needed and welcome, the problem is the asshat providers of the stuff are so concerned with creating an artificially inflated value for their products that they won't let us play with their material, so we all lose (same goes with the RIAA folks).
I mean, how many standard video formats are there? Sure the medium will have to change becausse DVDs can only hold just shy of 10 gigs of data, but the actual data is immaterial (so long as it plays).
The only difference to the end user between HDDVD and blu ray is the menuing and whatnot that probably sucks just as bad as DVDs and a simple point and click list of titles would be sufficient and preferred like a digital cable box, sat box, or Tivo like thing.
A hybrid player would be welcomed, and I think it would benefit the end user.
The sooner they realize this the better. Maybe then they can focus more on script and acting lessons and less on CGI and camera resolution.
The whole thing (like most everything) is about money.
Even buying a one-off render farm for $2-5 million dollars for one movie is cheaper than one brand name actor.
Its even more interesting when you follow the money more closely. The script gets little attention to the money scheme. The difference is if the script is based off of another already known and popular format. Most other movie scripts are written by nobodies. The 2006 best movie Oscar nominees were written by Guillermo Arriaga, William Monahan, Iris Yamashita, Michael Arndt, and Peter Morgan. All of which are basically nobodies compared to the directors, actors, or whatever. My point is that plots, aside from already known ones, do not sell movies.
Actors, directors, CGI seem to be what people are willing to pay for.
You want real acting or writing? I guess your $10 movie ticket just turned into a $75 theater ticket.
I've never run into a problem like that. However, if I were in a situation like that and had already quit my previous position, I would probably
1) take the job 2) start job-hunting immediately 3) see if this was an anomaly or business-as-usual for a company without a moral compass.
If it's business-as-usual I'd jump ship as soon as I got another job.
This would be an appropriate course of action if relocation wasn't an option. But relocating 2x possibly across the country each time back to back sucks.
In this situation, I would go back to my old job and ask them if I can stay. The last 2 jobs I resigned from offered me counter offers when I resigned. I don't know what this guy's situation is like at his old job, but he may be able to renegotiate with them at least until he finds a better job.
I was going to say... What would happen if we all started replying with the same auto generated mails? How would the spammers tell the difference from legit spam replies?
That too has been implemented. Its an invited DDOS attack on the spammer. I love it:)
Regarding the article, this is no big deal. Blacklists, whitelists, and greylists already exist. There is no additional market value with those techniques to eliminate spam.
Basically from their BS metric, books and tapes don't matter at all, you're still dumb as a brick with those...
Read below in this thread. The "BS metric" is excactly that. This is astroturf for a marketing campaign for high speed internet.
I will stick to my opinion that the internet has made people smarter. I would say that its up there with the printing press in terms of affecting people's lives. Only geeks had computers before AOL, and other online capabilities occured. Now, most everybody has a computer, and that is because if the internet.
Actually I remember my older sisters having boxes of 45 rpm singles. It wasn't until cassettes and 8-track became predominate in the early 70's that you almost had to buy the whole collection of songs that comprised an album.
Singles were a marketed item until the advent of the CD. Now that we have digital formats, the record labels simply don't want to sell singles at all. They even fought Apple, the leader in MP3 player sales, to "let" them sell MP3 singles, and then would only let them do it at a high price with DRM. Buying a Beatles single is still either impossible or very limited.
An interesting piece of trivia here. Albums, with respect to music, mean a collection (like a photo album). Back "in the day" an album was a few 78 RPM discs bundled together. It wasn't until the advent of the 12" LP (long play) 33.3 RPM discs that an album was able to fit on one consumer playable media. That is why albums, records, vinyl, etc are synonymous.
The reason that the name was changed and an additional song or two added , different artwork whatever, was so that you went out and bought the "import" version as well....
If that is true (I doubt it), that is a poor marketing decision. The label does not make any more money off of imports, the markup is really because it is imported. Remember, label's customers are distribution outlets, not you. You are there just to consume, be sued, or do nothing...
Language? I learned English from tapes and books, and then from a teacher. I got taught French by my grandma using Pif comics. You don't need a video to learn a new language, you just need to hear and read it.
No, you don't need the internet, but you need something to learn a new language.
Books and audio tapes are almost as new as the internet, and people are smarter because of all three.
Back in the 60's, British and US releases had different songs on them.
British had "With the Beatles" while an album with slightly different tracks called "Meet the Beatles" came out in the US.
The British version of "Are You Experienced?" by Hendrix had additional songs, such as "Red House" which the record company felt would go over better in Britain than the US, even though it was a straight blues track and blues was born in the US. *shrugs*
So while in the age of the internet, this seems silly, it's nothing new.
Right, its now 2007. Back in the 60s if you bought music, you pretty much had to listen to at least 1/2 an album at a time. In 2007, there is no reason a consumer in a free market cannot buy an electronic copy of all of the tracks from an album that is over 30 years old with a 50% probability that the creators of the music is dead.
There is no reason I can't download any track for $0.10 to $0.99 of an over 30 year old Beatles track individually from iTunes. But being that the music people don't want to sell the stuff, that way we are forced to get it other ways.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were single, even if I didn't have 25k laying around, I would find it and go.
If I were married with no children, I would either "ask permission" or possibly just find the money and go anyway.
Going to space is a little cooler than any exotic vacation here on earth, and 25k is not pocket change, but it is manageable.
They don't? I guess you built the road you drive on yourself, personally arrested any criminals who might have accosted you during the journey, and convinced everyone to respect private property so your company could exist in the first place.
And printed the money that you are paid with, and most importantly, you made and enforced the laws to ensure that the company that you work for will actually pay you for your work, have decent conditions at work including the number of hours and all of that.
Yes, I'm as anti-governemnt as anybody, but I'm more anti-selfish dickhead more, and the government keeps those people and themselves pretty much in check.
They attack this problem in Australia (and other places) by taxing the organiser of the lottery, all advertised prizes are for the "after tax" value, if it says "First prize: $1M" and you win, you get $1M.
I am not a government expert, but from what I hear and gather, the Australian government is simply better than the US government.
Yes, advertised prizes should be after tax. Another thing that Australia has done recently that the US probably never will is to do away with rider bills.
Its very frustrating to live in the country with arguably the best constitution ever written and have it treated as merely a historical document since WWII or the 60s however you look at it.
I'm thinking of creating a bumper sticker for the next presidential election that says something like "Please vote for a president that will uphold the constitution", but something like that might get me arrested and probably would go above 99% of the people's heads.
I tip my hat to them.
I do too. This is a very mature and wise decision for Adobe to make.
I know now that I was wrong, but I did not care for PDFs for years. And still to this day I have issues with people that don't do them correctly (basically those that put a bunch of huge images into a PDF container).
But with the advent of Linux and especially OS X being able to create PDFs so easily, and I can share documents with anybody and have them look like they are supposed to look is very nice.
Although I would have prefered if this was an open spec with quality PDF generators from day one, 10 years or so of progress to that ultimate goal is not bad in the long run.
This model should be _the_ standard for propriatary data formats. By that, I mean going from propriatary to an open standard if it cannot be an open standard from the beginning. Autodesk, MS, etc, I'm looking at you for adopting such a respectable decision for document formats.
The implications already are that .com is commerce, .org is nonprofits, .gov is government, and .net is for networks (for instance, ISPs).
.gov is actually enforced.
.edu is fairly pure as well. .org, .net, and .com are basically synonymous.
.biz? From my spamassassin rules, its synonymous with spam.
As far as I know, only
And
So, if there is a theory of rationale behind the TLDs, then what is
"Any commercial Internet site or online service that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors"
Since when is a preview of educational material harmful to minors?
OK, to be more blunt, since when is random consensual sexual acts between legal adults in the country of Sealand harmful to minors in Kentucky, USA?
The fist time I saw this kind of stuff as a minor, the only way I was harmed was that my wee-wee got stiff. Actually, at that age it got stiff for unknown reasons as well.
Has anyone actually investigated whether the XXX industry actually WANTS the tld?
.com and other domains like it is now.
/rant
First, TLDs are a good idea that simply do not work in reality. Proof of this is that slashdot.com and slashdot.org are exactly the same even though they have different TLDs. OK, that was a bad example, because a counter to that would be a few years ago with whitehouse.com vs whitehouse.gov.
The deal with the XXX domain is that it will be yet another gold rush for the "good ones" if it comes into existence, but then nothing will change. Porn will be typosquatted and littered all over the
My point is that TLDs are ineffective in reality (but great in theory), and the XXX TLD would be great to help save the children (in theory), but the poor kids will see people fucking and sucking even if there is a XXX domain.
Since the phone is not subsidized, there *should* be no 2 year contract requirement.
What a concept. Actually make a product that people want, sell it to them at a fairly premium price, and to boot don't lock them with a service plan. This will bring the cell phone market upside down.
Why do consumers agree to 2 year contracts for a commodity service when the contract gains them nothing?
These kinds of agreements by consumers are really going to start screwing everybody real soon. Imagine when _ALL_ of your services come with contracts?
I begrudgingly signed a one year contract (lease) for an apartment when I didn't own a house, and that bothered me. But I would never sign an agreement to pay someone hundreds of dollars to stop using their shitty service. That makes no sense to me.
I agree as well.
I don't see what is special about wikipedia, if I were a college professor, I would not accept any online references.
I use Google and wikipedia daily, and if I were back in college today, I would still use them to augment my research, but any bozo can put up a website and say anything they want.
Well, I amend my original statement about online references. You can reference this post
Why the hell are we still using coins and bills? Fiat currency is arbitrary anyway, can we please just move over to plastic entirely?
I would, but hookers and drug dealers only take cash.
Money is strange. Its illegal to have too much of it. Its illegal to do certain things to it (deface, destroy, etc). Its all very strange.
It has 6 to 10 digit numerical password. No special characters, no alphabets. Very simple authentication system. They should know that they will attract phishers and scammers like honey draws the bees.
Phishers and scammers are not detered by "strong" passwords.
Asking for and receiving a password via phishing or scamming is just as easy for a password that is one character between and a million characters. Even with special characters, upper lower case, whatever.
At home, with their parents who can teach them the importance of drinking responsibly while they are still at home.
The problem is with the parents/parenting to begin with.
Americans are pretty psychotic with respect to things like mistakes, moderation, and honest communication.
Instead of these things, we like harder rules and harder punishments. Things like zero tolerance, mandatory minimums, 3 strike rules, police roadblocks.
There is a saying that goes something like "The firmer grip you use, the faster the the stuff squirts between your fingers". This is what is happening.
I live in one of the most policed conservative states in the US, and it sucks. Trust me, once your "in the system" its next to impossible to get out of it.
spent almost a man year in total on trying to fix our software. It turns out that the south bridge is the problem.
and
We still picked a VIA one though (with a C7 and a 8237) because frankly, their prices are hard to beat.
Are mutually exclusive in my book, unless you are talking about a large volume of machines (~50+ something well beyond one or two).
Personally, I've been interested in getting a small computer for years, but I can't justify the price/performance + my time factor, so I just havn't bothered. Whenever I go to mini-itx.com and price something together, I scratch my head and ask why would I get something in about the Mac mini form factor with less capabilities than a mini that costs the same as a mini?
Granted, I havn't bought a mini either. I guess I'm just a glorified window shopper.
5) Cheaper to produce
6) Higher quality
7) Longer lasting
Funny how that when media gets cheaper to produce, higher quality and longer lasting that the prices go up, demand goes up, but supply is never in agreement with demand or price.
Most of the customers out there have 27" or smaller non-HD sets - the different in quality between DVD and HD-DVD/Blu-ray is negligible.
Actually, its zero. DVD resolution is SD. Content scaled to 480 scan lines is as good as the scaler, that is it.
I embraced the DVD thing. Smaller form factor, no rewinding. Still frames. Higher resolution, better sound. I was happy.
Well, what happened?
I got a nice HDTV, and DVD quality simply does not cut it anymore.
An upgrade in formats is needed and welcome, the problem is the asshat providers of the stuff are so concerned with creating an artificially inflated value for their products that they won't let us play with their material, so we all lose (same goes with the RIAA folks).
I mean, how many standard video formats are there? Sure the medium will have to change becausse DVDs can only hold just shy of 10 gigs of data, but the actual data is immaterial (so long as it plays).
The only difference to the end user between HDDVD and blu ray is the menuing and whatnot that probably sucks just as bad as DVDs and a simple point and click list of titles would be sufficient and preferred like a digital cable box, sat box, or Tivo like thing.
A hybrid player would be welcomed, and I think it would benefit the end user.
The sooner they realize this the better. Maybe then they can focus more on script and acting lessons and less on CGI and camera resolution.
The whole thing (like most everything) is about money.
Even buying a one-off render farm for $2-5 million dollars for one movie is cheaper than one brand name actor.
Its even more interesting when you follow the money more closely. The script gets little attention to the money scheme. The difference is if the script is based off of another already known and popular format. Most other movie scripts are written by nobodies. The 2006 best movie Oscar nominees were written by Guillermo Arriaga, William Monahan,
Iris Yamashita, Michael Arndt, and Peter Morgan. All of which are basically nobodies compared to the directors, actors, or whatever. My point is that plots, aside from already known ones, do not sell movies.
Actors, directors, CGI seem to be what people are willing to pay for.
You want real acting or writing? I guess your $10 movie ticket just turned into a $75 theater ticket.
I've never run into a problem like that. However, if I were in a situation like that and had already quit my previous position, I would probably
1) take the job
2) start job-hunting immediately
3) see if this was an anomaly or business-as-usual for a company without a moral compass.
If it's business-as-usual I'd jump ship as soon as I got another job.
This would be an appropriate course of action if relocation wasn't an option. But relocating 2x possibly across the country each time back to back sucks.
In this situation, I would go back to my old job and ask them if I can stay. The last 2 jobs I resigned from offered me counter offers when I resigned. I don't know what this guy's situation is like at his old job, but he may be able to renegotiate with them at least until he finds a better job.
I was going to say... What would happen if we all started replying with the same auto generated mails? How would the spammers tell the difference from legit spam replies?
:)
That too has been implemented. Its an invited DDOS attack on the spammer. I love it
Regarding the article, this is no big deal. Blacklists, whitelists, and greylists already exist. There is no additional market value with those techniques to eliminate spam.
HP actually _made_ excellent printers.
Now, HP spys on its customers and competeters printer habits.
Their stock value should reflect this better.
Basically from their BS metric, books and tapes don't matter at all, you're still dumb as a brick with those...
Read below in this thread. The "BS metric" is excactly that. This is astroturf for a marketing campaign for high speed internet.
I will stick to my opinion that the internet has made people smarter. I would say that its up there with the printing press in terms of affecting people's lives. Only geeks had computers before AOL, and other online capabilities occured. Now, most everybody has a computer, and that is because if the internet.
Actually I remember my older sisters having boxes of 45 rpm singles. It wasn't until cassettes and 8-track became predominate in the early 70's that you almost had to buy the whole collection of songs that comprised an album.
Singles were a marketed item until the advent of the CD. Now that we have digital formats, the record labels simply don't want to sell singles at all. They even fought Apple, the leader in MP3 player sales, to "let" them sell MP3 singles, and then would only let them do it at a high price with DRM. Buying a Beatles single is still either impossible or very limited.
An interesting piece of trivia here. Albums, with respect to music, mean a collection (like a photo album). Back "in the day" an album was a few 78 RPM discs bundled together. It wasn't until the advent of the 12" LP (long play) 33.3 RPM discs that an album was able to fit on one consumer playable media. That is why albums, records, vinyl, etc are synonymous.
The reason that the name was changed and an additional song or two added , different artwork whatever, was so that you went out and bought the "import" version as well....
If that is true (I doubt it), that is a poor marketing decision. The label does not make any more money off of imports, the markup is really because it is imported. Remember, label's customers are distribution outlets, not you. You are there just to consume, be sued, or do nothing...
Language? I learned English from tapes and books, and then from a teacher. I got taught French by my grandma using Pif comics. You don't need a video to learn a new language, you just need to hear and read it.
No, you don't need the internet, but you need something to learn a new language.
Books and audio tapes are almost as new as the internet, and people are smarter because of all three.
Back in the 60's, British and US releases had different songs on them.
British had "With the Beatles" while an album with slightly different tracks called "Meet the Beatles" came out in the US.
The British version of "Are You Experienced?" by Hendrix had additional songs, such as "Red House" which the record company felt would go over better in Britain than the US, even though it was a straight blues track and blues was born in the US. *shrugs*
So while in the age of the internet, this seems silly, it's nothing new.
Right, its now 2007. Back in the 60s if you bought music, you pretty much had to listen to at least 1/2 an album at a time. In 2007, there is no reason a consumer in a free market cannot buy an electronic copy of all of the tracks from an album that is over 30 years old with a 50% probability that the creators of the music is dead.
There is no reason I can't download any track for $0.10 to $0.99 of an over 30 year old Beatles track individually from iTunes. But being that the music people don't want to sell the stuff, that way we are forced to get it other ways.
This is just the way the music business works.
Correction.
This is just the way the music business worked or has worked.
I doubt today that there is anything on iTunes US or Japan that I can't get in hours or at most a week for less than $0.99.
Does anybody here think this is a hard challenge?