Ah, that was cute. "The customer is always right" is an attitude that will get you fired in retail. The real rule is "The boss is always right. The customer is only right when the boss says so."
No, in retail, the days of worrying about keeping customers happy are pretty much over. Retailers have been practicing being rude and inattentive to customers over the past decade or two, and have found that people will keep coming back as long as your prices are okay, your hours are okay, and your employees don't actually assault customers.
That's a slight exaggeration, but not so much as you might think. These days the defense of anything rude or customer unfriendly will be that the practice is "industry standard." That is, everybody else is just as rude and customer unfriendly (or close enough that nobody cares about the difference). As long as everybody gets ruder at about the same pace, then everybody can save money and watch their profits increase.
You will see continued deterioration in the areas of returns/exchanges, accurate and clear signing, bowling ball factor (the probability that a bowling ball rolled down an aisle at random would strike an employee), pushiness of cross-selling (especially branded credit cards), and employee time and attention to customers. This will continue until somebody someplace decides to give good customer service, and people are willing to pay a little more to get it.
I started working in retail 15 years ago, and I've been out of it for just over a year now. Customer service is much more a buzz-word and much less a priority than it was 15 years ago.
Nope. It was cool to be stupid a lot earlier than that. You wouldn't know who John Travolta is if it weren't for Vinnie Barbarino and the Sweat Hogs. It's only been cool to be smart for brief snatches of the century. Isaac Asimov wrote an essay encouraging kids to be "eggheads" shortly before the Sputnik era made it very important to have smart people around. That and Silicon Valley are about the only times I can think of where it was all that cool to be smart, and that wore out.
Cool to be stupid works because "cool" isn't about being smart -- it's about making fun of people who are smart. It's not about working hard and being productive -- it's about making fun of people who work hard and are productive.
Michael Kelly (the American journalist killed in Iraq last year) has an interesting article on how the idea of "cool" has had a lot to do with the destruction of our society. It's something to think about.
I'm not sure what you mean. Doing an hd install of knoppix on a system that has Windows installed automagically sets up LILO (if not totally automagically, then with one of those prompts easily forgotten in the hd install process), and then the system boots with the option of Windows or Linux (or whatever else you might have hanging around your system).
I think the (in)effectiveness of labeling in making it easy to filter spam will depend heavily on the filter you're using. And the language courtesy of spamlaws.com does indicate that the labeling must be:
(i) clear and conspicuous identification that the message is an advertisement or solicitation;
(ii) clear and conspicuous notice of the opportunity under paragraph (3) to decline to receive further commercial electronic mail messages from the sender; and
(iii) a valid physical postal address of the sender.
There are a finite number of "clear and conspicuous" ways of identifying a message as an advertisement or solicitation, so even static filters shouldn't have too much trouble with that. POPFile has been very reliable in grabbing spam that has used quite a few tricks -- it'll snag these things with no problem at all.
This law clearly isn't a panacaea, and I have doubts about the enforceability of it, but it's a start. And it does require review of its effectiveness and whether it will need to be changed, and that's a good thing. I don't expect congresscritters to get this right the first time out of the box. It shouldn't take long for it to prove ineffective if it's going to be, and the popular hatred of spam will continue to provide political pressure to get something more effective (if change of law will do it).
I've set up two Debian boxes using Knoppix hd install. It takes one CD iso (plus a little apt-get play when you're done). You need to know what you want in terms of partitions etc., but it's not that tough.
The first of those boxes has been running for three months now with two reboots (plus a power outage restart), and those reboots are because I'm still too much of a noob to know how to restart the network connection when it's been lost without rebooting. I've not seen any reason in practice to be worried about this being unstable-based.
It's running 100 miles from here being used by my mother (who's over 70) and her 50something roommates, none of which is terribly geeky. Their only complaint is that a work-related site they use frequently requires IE, and they can't do that through Firebird.
A couple months ago I tried working with a Lindows machine for my mother (who is over retirement age and not terribly geeky). She needed something she could do email with and write letters, basically. So I got her a Lindows machine through a listed provider. And I had trouble with it. I personally liked the Debian side of the system better than the Lindows side of things, and leaned on that side of things while trying to learn how to get good use out of it.
Now, much of the problem came in that the machine came with an older version of Lindows than it was supposed to, so I was running into dependency incompatibilities that were screwing things up pretty badly.
In figuring out what was going on, I stumbled into a Debian irc channel and mentioned the word Lindows -- I got the response you would get from telling the audience at a Rob Zombie concert that Barry Manilow would be opening for Rob. Once I got loose from the stake and stomped the fire out, one of them suggested looking into Knoppix.
I found myself in a situation where I was going to have to download and install a full new system. Having very limited access to high-speed connections at the time, I decided to try Knoppix. In researching it, I found that installing Knoppix to the hd wasn't supposed to be all that tough.
So I downloaded the iso, burned the cd, and tried it. It took some tweaking to get the graphics mode to work properly (but the reception my question got in the #knoppix channel was much nicer than before). The hd install took some tweaking (learning the partitioning game took several tries), and I had some fun getting the language things set to US-English rather than German, but I've been pleased with the experience.
I wouldn't be comfortable having Lindows out-of-the-box running on the shared T-1 connection she has -- running as root with an always-on connection just bothers me. Although, honestly, Knoppix has the same problem. I set up fiaif as firewall, and it seems to be catching a whole boat-load of UDP requests (about one every 7 seconds) without a problem (other than growing logs). The machine's been running just fine since I left it several weeks ago (she lives a couple hours away), and she and her roommates are using it regularly -- no reboots needed, no system crashes, no problems.
I've learned quite a lot in this process. In the next few weeks, I'll probably be putting together a new system for a friend that will just start with the new Knoppix without using the Lindows first-step. I'm much closer to ready to jump out of the MS world myself -- just a few more apps to duplicate or see if I can run under Wine, and then I'll be ready to go.
I would recommend anybody interested in Lindows try Knoppix first, frankly. You can test it with no commitment, and putting it on a hd partition is pretty easy.
Indeed, spam filtering and monitoring the filtering is still much (much) faster than just reading through your inbox at anything that comes by. Setting up POPFile didn't take all that long, and requires no initial training -- you just train on errors. Setting up Mozilla/TB to work with it took me probably another hour or so, but I've got quite a few buckets and am subscribed to quite a few mail lists. The TB filtering system works quite well -- I can have a general "list" filter, and then specific filters and folders for individual lists that I can put in front of the general filter, so I don't have to generate folders and filters for my very low volume lists right away.
Checking my spam folders has gotten quite a lot faster too, using the junk mail settings on TB. I have it set so that anything I manually designate as "junk" is deleted. So I uncheck anything listed as junk, and then put my mouse on the "junk" setting for the first message. It takes a fraction of a second to verify that the message is spam and click the mouse button -- I can blow through a dozen or more messages in half a minute, maybe.
Of course, the point of the parent was that we should not be protecting ourselves from spam, but, rather, should be anti-spam activists trying to stamp out the spammers. I think there's a point in there, but it's pretty scant. Effectively fighting spam is something that takes a fair amount of time and effort -- it's mostly "for professionals only." Back in the day when spam was much more rare, I did my part to report spammers to their postmasters. I remember a particularly nasty exchange with a spammer who was threatening to have hundreds of people mail bomb me. These days, it's darn hard to figure out who it is you should be yelling at and how to reach them. This is not something that every user should try -- their time will be better spent using spam filtering tools. Setting up automagic forwarding to the ftc might not be a bad idea -- anybody want to make a TB extension along those lines? But my life is far too short to spend minutes and hours a day every day devoted to dealing with spammers.
I have been using POPFile for months now, with a fairly complex setup, one of the things I like about POPFile versus the others I've seen (which are two or three bucket systems). It's classifying more than 99% accurately every month for the past three or four months (I reset my statistics around the first of every month) and has never been less than 95% accurate in a month (including its training month). For an idea of what my loads and buckets are like, this list of my buckets and the number of messages classified into them since the first of the month will help:
ads -- 25 (0.58%)
bounces -- 2 (0.04%)
business -- 18 (0.42%)
family -- 10 (0.23%)
forwards -- 8 (0.18%)
list -- 3,242 (75.72%)
personal -- 68 (1.58%)
politics -- 11 (0.25%)
pornspam -- 136 (3.17%)
scams -- 24 (0.56%)
spam -- 678 (15.83%)
webgenerated -- 57 (1.33%)
website -- 2 (0.04%)
I've been using TB for a couple months now, and very much like it. I've used the built-in junk filtering since I first got it, and have found that it is only getting about 1/3 to 1/2 of the things already catagorized for my spam buckets, with a higher rate of false-positives than POPFile. I would like to see something more reliable, and hope updating the algorithm will help.
As complicated as my buckets may look, this system works very well for me -- with the addition of a "misc" folder that anything not classified goes into, and some filters based on the X-Classified line, almost nothing that gets into my inbox is anything other than personal email.
Actually, what you described is a rather inaccurate representation of Mormon belief. Celestial brides need not be plural, and women become godesses, not gods. Since God created worlds without number, we can expect that those who receive the fullness of his glory will do the same.
As fun as it is, you might want to get all your Mormon information from sources that aren't anti-Mormon. If you had accurate information about thsoe beliefs, you might find it's not as nonsensical as you thought.
The distributor in the described system is providing value by listening to a song and deciding it's worth distributing. Musicians promoting their own music don't get very far if they are the only ones doing that promoting. This is one of the services that publishers of music (although it works the same for book publishers) provide -- filtering out stuff that's not very good.
A new artist needs to get their music listened to by more people more than they need total ownership of their music. 100% of nothing is still nothing. 50% of something is more than nothing. And someone looking for new music to listen to needs someone who can point them in a useful direction.
I think the described system has some definite merits, frankly.
The "plastics" line was also a reference to the movie "It's a Wonderful Life," from the scene where George and Mary are sharing the phone while talking to "Hee-Haw" Sam Wainwright (who not incidentally got rather rich on his plastics, while George was stuck at the Building and Loan).
Another perhaps little known reference to that film were the Sesame Street characters named after Bert the cop and Ernie the cab-driver./me will spew trivia for food.
Most likely, the fares on the website weren't fares that they could give you -- to get those fares, you have to use the website.
The airlines I know of do not give any kind of bonus or commission to the res agents based on their sales -- they're straight wage, with little spiffs for things like credit-card or rental-car referrals.
As I mentioned, if you have some flexibility on your schedule, you can save money. Also, prices really can change multiple times a day, and cheaper seats can be sold out from under you if you wait.
Well, not all airlines are going broke, although everybody's having a hard time staying solvent right now. The additional security the past few years has made the price of flying higher for passengers in terms of time and money and hassle, so fewer people are flying. Also, fuel prices have been higher, adding further to the costs of operation.
But I don't know what you mean by "those that aren't using it." AFAIK, the only airline that has significantly different prices for the same class of seat in the same markets is Southwest, and I don't know that they aren't using the same basic pricing structure with different numbers. If you can give some details of what you're referring to, maybe somebody can give a more clear response.
Having a well honed pricing structure will tend to maximize profits, but can't possibly guarantee that that maximum will even be a positive number.
Actually, the airline pricing system is one of the best honed out there. It enables airlines to sell more really cheap fares, to have seats available up to the last minute for people who absolutely positively have to have one on no real notice, against competitors who can (and do) change prices on competing products multiple times a day, all while keep the airline roughly solvent.
This is not a simple thing to do.
For those who are interested in getting the best deals, some tips I've learned from my mother, the reservation agent:
Put the best fare you can find on courtesy hold, even if you think it's too high. If you find a better fare in 24 hours, your courtesy hold is lifted and no harm is done. If you don't, you still get the same fare 24 hours later (sometimes that fare will not be available a few minutes later -- somebody else may buy the same seat, and it could be the last one available in that flight at that price).
Be as flexible as you can be, and buy as early as possible. A day or two of flexibility in your travel dates can have a huge impact on the price you're going to need to pay -- even a few hours can make a big difference. And the reason there are seats available at the last minute is that the last few seats in a plane can be very expensive. The earlier you are trying to get on the flight, the more cheap fares will be available.
If you see a very inexpensive price in an ad, read the fine print before you get your hopes up. Those fares are almost always one-way based on a round-trip ticket, don't include taxes or fees, and describe a limited number of seats on a limited number of flights on a limited number of days. If you have flexibility in your travel dates and times, as I mentioned above, you may be able to get one of those fares.
Be nice to your reservation agent. Sometimes, a res agent will have a certain amount of flexibility that they can use to address whatever problem you are facing. This will take their time and effort, and will almost always involve the time and attention of a supervisor or the help desk, and they don't get paid extra for doing this (or less for not doing it). If you are obnoxious, pushy, insulting, or demeaning, they will be more interested in getting you off the phone and out of their hair than they will in expending this time and effort. Treating people the way you would like to be treated is more likely to get you treated the way you would like to be treated than being a butt-head is. Saying "thank you" at the end of the call can be in your best interest, even if you weren't all that happy with the experience. Things also work better if you aren't muttering things like "this is ridiculous" through the whole call.
For the time being, at least, web-fares are cheaper. Making your reservation over the net can be cheaper, because you're not using the time of a human to help you with your reservation. However, that human knows what you are doing better than you do in most cases, and may be able to find you better fares or flights than you can for yourself. If you're not really certain of what you are doing, it may be worth your time and money to deal with a real human to bring you up to speed on what the issues are.
And, because I know this is a frequent problem she runs into:
Listen to the rules and limitations the res agent has to read to you. They find it more boring than you do, but they have to do it, and you will listen to it if you're smart. There may be restrictions on your fare that you won't know about (like the amount of a change fee you may have to pay to make a change to your ticket) if you don't listen which can come back to bite you. Even if you fly twice a week, each fare can have its own limitations, so pay attention to the nuances.
Legislators support their party's position (when there is one) most of the time for a very simple reason -- their positions are more likely to be reflected in law if they do.
Most folks don't understand some of the basic realities for a legislator. One of the most fundamental is that the most important vote in any legislative session is the first one -- for the leader of the house. The party with the majority selects the leader, who selects the chairs of the committees (in the Congress, the selection of chairs is a bit more complicated than that, but the chair will always be in the majority party). The chairs, in turn, determine which bills will ever have a prayer of going forward. This is why the idea that "party doesn't matter" may work in selecting the candidate you're going to vote for, but is silly in considering what that candidate will do once they are elected -- because the first thing they will do (if they are legislative candidates) is vote for their party's leadership, and everything they do will be impacted based on whether or not the person they voted for won.
Another reality is that legislators routinely do not read the bills they vote on, because there simply isn't time for each of them to read every bill that comes by -- some individual bills are thicker than those huge Linux manuals, and they're not quite as easy to read. Since there isn't time to read them all, they have to rely on others who have more expertise to help them know which bills they want to support, which they want to kill, and which they want to amend. On party bills, that's pretty easy -- they will follow the leadership of their party unless they've got a good reason not to. Most bills, though, aren't party bills, and, in those cases, they will probably rely on lobbyists that have expertise on that issue. The lobbyists may have actually written the legislation, and can bring up the important things to pay attention to.
Another is ignoring the fact that virtually every communication from a constituent can be handled by the following basic letter:
Dear Constituent:
Thank you for sharing with me your views on copyright laws. I always like to know the opinions of my constituents. I will keep this in mind should this issue come before me for a vote.
Please feel free to contact me again if I can be of further help.
With this issue, you might get a paragraph sorta like this:
I share your concern about fair use, but am also concerned with the amount of infringement going on. We need to balance the interests of consumers and the entertainment industry. This is why I supported the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Political parties are a useful construction -- they provide a loose umbrella under which those with similar interests can work together to further their common interests. The people in those parties -- without exception -- are imperfect, and some are dishonest or even criminal. This doesn't invalidate the parties, nor the party system. Party remains a useful way of knowing basically where a candidate is coming from in terms of philosophy and positions -- if they differ from their party's basic positions, they'll show that sooner or later.
Party is not a useful way of knowing how much character someone has. If you haven't found political folks who you like but don't agree with and people you agree with but don't like, you haven't been paying enough attention. Both exist, no matter what your positions or tastes.
So I am not one who finds any particular virtue in the notion of being an "independent." I don't find any particular virtue in being in any given party either, except for this: politics is team sport, and the parties are the teams. Joining a party is joining a team and getting into the game. Small groups of individuals can be ideologically pure, but, in any kind of democracy, they ought not have
Wait for sending out messages to random Congressfolk until the bill is submitted and has a number. If you contact your Senators or Rep to support a bill without a number, it's not going to reflect well on your position unless you have a relationship with them to begin with or know that they're so into the issue that they might sign on to cosponsor.
Hitting Sen. Brownback's website, there's no mention of this bill at all. My guess is that we're ahead of the curve on this. The work to do now is going to be more along the lines of organizing the effort to work this bill. It's going to take time and commitment (not to mention attention span). If the bill's not submitted yet, selected calls to the right senators can help collect cosponsors. After it's been submitted, it's a good idea to contact the committee staff and committee members of the appropriate committee (especially if they're from your state) to encourage their support in scheduling the bill for a hearing and their vote to report it out of committee. This process is slow and long (review "I'm Just a Bill" from Schoolhouse Rock for a brief reminder).
It is good to contact Congressfolk to tell them what you want them to do. It's very good to be polite, succinct, and thoughtful in your presentation. It's very important to have the right message at the right time -- they get so much mail and email and phone comments every day that asking for their support for something that won't need their attention for months (or years) can seem to them an annoying waste of time.
Contacting Sen. Brownback's staff to thank them for this bill is a very good idea, especially for Kansans. Asking how you could help would also be a good idea.
Enough with the Hindenberg, already. The Hindenberg didn't burn like it did because of the hydrogen in it -- it was because the varnish they used was the same chemical compound as rocket fuel -- oxidizer built in.
If you watch the footage, you can see the whispy hydrogen flames going upward, while the heavy flames on the outside shell burn hot enough to distort the metal. The hydrogen didn't have enough air mixed in to really burn well or explode.
Not trying to scare you, just make sure you're covered if the guy on the third floor turns out to be a pedophile, terrorist, or (gasp) file trader.:-)
Ah. So you've noticed that guy on the third floor too? Good. I thought it was just me! I was kinda thinking terrorist, but he could be a file trader too.
Now, do the voices talk to you too, or is that really just me?
Because Portland didn't do it. If you want to do it, get to work, and you can do it too.
Why Bellingham?
Because Bellingham's already been doing it.
Because Bellingham is cooler than Portland.
Because the Cocoanut Grove is within walking distance from BTC (Portland can not say the same thing, btw).
Because Bellingham is much closer to Illiad.
Because Bellingham is much cooler than Tacoma (and safer if you're not packing heat). It even smells better since they closed the toxic waste incinerator.
I suppose you could make a list as long or interesting about Portland or Tacoma, and I could make one about Sedro-Woolley or Ferndale if you wanted. If those places want to do as much work and make this happen, I think that'd be okay too. In this case, they haven't yet.
There has been a fair amount of religious oppression imposed by states within the US. Until a decade or so ago, it was still the law that any Mormon found in Missouri could be exterminated. It was also written into the Idaho Constitution that anyone who believed in the doctrine of the Mormon Church was unable to vote until about the same time. Neither law had been enforced for decades, but they remained "on the books." And religious oppression imposed by citizens of the US has been hardly uncommon.
Racism is much less of a problem in the US than in most of the world. And religious persecution here now is pretty mild level stuff -- we don't have mobs burning houses, beating people and raping women here all that often anymore. Both still exist, and neither is at an acceptable level (since there is no acceptable level IMO).
Tribalism remains a problem of all humanity -- we view people we consider of our "tribe" to be different from and better than those who aren't, for no particular reason other than, on whatever basis we define our "tribe," they are like "us." In the US, those tribal lines remain mostly informal, and are less likely to be drawn on a strictly racial or religious line than in other places. But you can still find it unsafe to be found in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin color, wearing the wrong clothes, or simply not being recognized by anybody.
Terrorists not only have a strong sense of "tribe," they also have a strong belief that hideous and unacceptable treatment of people from other tribes is acceptable and even commendable. Fundamentalism can play along with tribalism and make things particularly ugly.
Please note that I'm not saying that fundamentalism and tribalism make terrorism -- that's taking my points way too far. They play roles in supporting terrorism, but they don't take anybody's choice to not engage in terrorist acts away.
Steve Forbes as wacko? Sure. Good idea. Take one of the the loudest voice in the media supporting your point of view and call him a name. That's the way to get some action around here -- stick with the people you're comfortable with and agree with on everything.
All four of them.
That's the way to change things in any kind of democracy -- make for a majority of four.
There's no reason to think that the Eldred Act is going to be a partisan bill -- making it so, and alienating the majority party in both houses would be rather stupid. You're already facing the opposition of the Senate Committee chair, who's very much opposed to the idea, so why pile on enemies to your bill just because you don't like them?
Do you want to accomplish something, or do you want to feel good about every detail of it?
Better idea -- take your friends where you can find them, and let them work for your side whenever you can. I've never found anybody I disliked enough that I would refuse to have them support my candidate or bill. And the folks in this fight just don't have the political clout to be rejecting any friendly offers from people with the money, following and audience of Steve Forbes.
The recent/. discussion of worms exploiting weak passwords got me thinking problems I have with consistently using strong passwords. I have heard many times that we should use strong passwords (mixed case, letters, symbols, no dictionary words in any language, no number patterns that others could derive, etc.), that we should not reuse passwords, that we should not write down passwords, but should always have them memorized.
Now, if I was on a handful of systems, this would make sense. However, I've found that many websites I come to are increasingly requiring registration, including creating a userid and password to log in to their systems. The personalization of my interface with their system is nice, but makes following the rules about passwords unmanageable -- I can't keep track of several dozen strong passwords from memory.
As an alternative to that, for website uses such as I've mentioned, it seems to me that making use of a public-key encryption system, something along the lines of what I understand SSL to do, would seem to make more sense. My system could exchange encrypted data with the web server using our known public keys, enabling us each to know that we are, in fact, who we claim to be. Even if I was required to use my pass-phrase that goes with that public key each time I logged in, it would be easier for me to remember that one pass-phrase (which could be even more secure than a 6-8 character password) than is currently available.
Obviously there would be change-over costs involved with this, but is there some big reason that this kind of a system would be less secure than the current system, particularly if we take into account the problem of weak and repeatedly used passwords?
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Ah, that was cute. "The customer is always right" is an attitude that will get you fired in retail. The real rule is "The boss is always right. The customer is only right when the boss says so."
No, in retail, the days of worrying about keeping customers happy are pretty much over. Retailers have been practicing being rude and inattentive to customers over the past decade or two, and have found that people will keep coming back as long as your prices are okay, your hours are okay, and your employees don't actually assault customers.
That's a slight exaggeration, but not so much as you might think. These days the defense of anything rude or customer unfriendly will be that the practice is "industry standard." That is, everybody else is just as rude and customer unfriendly (or close enough that nobody cares about the difference). As long as everybody gets ruder at about the same pace, then everybody can save money and watch their profits increase.
You will see continued deterioration in the areas of returns/exchanges, accurate and clear signing, bowling ball factor (the probability that a bowling ball rolled down an aisle at random would strike an employee), pushiness of cross-selling (especially branded credit cards), and employee time and attention to customers. This will continue until somebody someplace decides to give good customer service, and people are willing to pay a little more to get it.
I started working in retail 15 years ago, and I've been out of it for just over a year now. Customer service is much more a buzz-word and much less a priority than it was 15 years ago.
... that is so five years ago.
Nope. It was cool to be stupid a lot earlier than that. You wouldn't know who John Travolta is if it weren't for Vinnie Barbarino and the Sweat Hogs. It's only been cool to be smart for brief snatches of the century. Isaac Asimov wrote an essay encouraging kids to be "eggheads" shortly before the Sputnik era made it very important to have smart people around. That and Silicon Valley are about the only times I can think of where it was all that cool to be smart, and that wore out.
Cool to be stupid works because "cool" isn't about being smart -- it's about making fun of people who are smart. It's not about working hard and being productive -- it's about making fun of people who work hard and are productive.
Michael Kelly (the American journalist killed in Iraq last year) has an interesting article on how the idea of "cool" has had a lot to do with the destruction of our society. It's something to think about.
I'm not sure what you mean. Doing an hd install of knoppix on a system that has Windows installed automagically sets up LILO (if not totally automagically, then with one of those prompts easily forgotten in the hd install process), and then the system boots with the option of Windows or Linux (or whatever else you might have hanging around your system).
I don't know what could be easier.
I think the (in)effectiveness of labeling in making it easy to filter spam will depend heavily on the filter you're using. And the language courtesy of spamlaws.com does indicate that the labeling must be:
There are a finite number of "clear and conspicuous" ways of identifying a message as an advertisement or solicitation, so even static filters shouldn't have too much trouble with that. POPFile has been very reliable in grabbing spam that has used quite a few tricks -- it'll snag these things with no problem at all.
This law clearly isn't a panacaea, and I have doubts about the enforceability of it, but it's a start. And it does require review of its effectiveness and whether it will need to be changed, and that's a good thing. I don't expect congresscritters to get this right the first time out of the box. It shouldn't take long for it to prove ineffective if it's going to be, and the popular hatred of spam will continue to provide political pressure to get something more effective (if change of law will do it).
I've set up two Debian boxes using Knoppix hd install. It takes one CD iso (plus a little apt-get play when you're done). You need to know what you want in terms of partitions etc., but it's not that tough.
The first of those boxes has been running for three months now with two reboots (plus a power outage restart), and those reboots are because I'm still too much of a noob to know how to restart the network connection when it's been lost without rebooting. I've not seen any reason in practice to be worried about this being unstable-based.
It's running 100 miles from here being used by my mother (who's over 70) and her 50something roommates, none of which is terribly geeky. Their only complaint is that a work-related site they use frequently requires IE, and they can't do that through Firebird.
FWIW
A couple months ago I tried working with a Lindows machine for my mother (who is over retirement age and not terribly geeky). She needed something she could do email with and write letters, basically. So I got her a Lindows machine through a listed provider. And I had trouble with it. I personally liked the Debian side of the system better than the Lindows side of things, and leaned on that side of things while trying to learn how to get good use out of it.
Now, much of the problem came in that the machine came with an older version of Lindows than it was supposed to, so I was running into dependency incompatibilities that were screwing things up pretty badly.
In figuring out what was going on, I stumbled into a Debian irc channel and mentioned the word Lindows -- I got the response you would get from telling the audience at a Rob Zombie concert that Barry Manilow would be opening for Rob. Once I got loose from the stake and stomped the fire out, one of them suggested looking into Knoppix.
I found myself in a situation where I was going to have to download and install a full new system. Having very limited access to high-speed connections at the time, I decided to try Knoppix. In researching it, I found that installing Knoppix to the hd wasn't supposed to be all that tough.
So I downloaded the iso, burned the cd, and tried it. It took some tweaking to get the graphics mode to work properly (but the reception my question got in the #knoppix channel was much nicer than before). The hd install took some tweaking (learning the partitioning game took several tries), and I had some fun getting the language things set to US-English rather than German, but I've been pleased with the experience.
I wouldn't be comfortable having Lindows out-of-the-box running on the shared T-1 connection she has -- running as root with an always-on connection just bothers me. Although, honestly, Knoppix has the same problem. I set up fiaif as firewall, and it seems to be catching a whole boat-load of UDP requests (about one every 7 seconds) without a problem (other than growing logs). The machine's been running just fine since I left it several weeks ago (she lives a couple hours away), and she and her roommates are using it regularly -- no reboots needed, no system crashes, no problems.
I've learned quite a lot in this process. In the next few weeks, I'll probably be putting together a new system for a friend that will just start with the new Knoppix without using the Lindows first-step. I'm much closer to ready to jump out of the MS world myself -- just a few more apps to duplicate or see if I can run under Wine, and then I'll be ready to go.
I would recommend anybody interested in Lindows try Knoppix first, frankly. You can test it with no commitment, and putting it on a hd partition is pretty easy.
Oh. I thought it was referring to the Paul Simon song "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes."
Darn.
Indeed, spam filtering and monitoring the filtering is still much (much) faster than just reading through your inbox at anything that comes by. Setting up POPFile didn't take all that long, and requires no initial training -- you just train on errors. Setting up Mozilla/TB to work with it took me probably another hour or so, but I've got quite a few buckets and am subscribed to quite a few mail lists. The TB filtering system works quite well -- I can have a general "list" filter, and then specific filters and folders for individual lists that I can put in front of the general filter, so I don't have to generate folders and filters for my very low volume lists right away.
Checking my spam folders has gotten quite a lot faster too, using the junk mail settings on TB. I have it set so that anything I manually designate as "junk" is deleted. So I uncheck anything listed as junk, and then put my mouse on the "junk" setting for the first message. It takes a fraction of a second to verify that the message is spam and click the mouse button -- I can blow through a dozen or more messages in half a minute, maybe.
Of course, the point of the parent was that we should not be protecting ourselves from spam, but, rather, should be anti-spam activists trying to stamp out the spammers. I think there's a point in there, but it's pretty scant. Effectively fighting spam is something that takes a fair amount of time and effort -- it's mostly "for professionals only." Back in the day when spam was much more rare, I did my part to report spammers to their postmasters. I remember a particularly nasty exchange with a spammer who was threatening to have hundreds of people mail bomb me. These days, it's darn hard to figure out who it is you should be yelling at and how to reach them. This is not something that every user should try -- their time will be better spent using spam filtering tools. Setting up automagic forwarding to the ftc might not be a bad idea -- anybody want to make a TB extension along those lines? But my life is far too short to spend minutes and hours a day every day devoted to dealing with spammers.
I have been using POPFile for months now, with a fairly complex setup, one of the things I like about POPFile versus the others I've seen (which are two or three bucket systems). It's classifying more than 99% accurately every month for the past three or four months (I reset my statistics around the first of every month) and has never been less than 95% accurate in a month (including its training month). For an idea of what my loads and buckets are like, this list of my buckets and the number of messages classified into them since the first of the month will help:
I've been using TB for a couple months now, and very much like it. I've used the built-in junk filtering since I first got it, and have found that it is only getting about 1/3 to 1/2 of the things already catagorized for my spam buckets, with a higher rate of false-positives than POPFile. I would like to see something more reliable, and hope updating the algorithm will help.
As complicated as my buckets may look, this system works very well for me -- with the addition of a "misc" folder that anything not classified goes into, and some filters based on the X-Classified line, almost nothing that gets into my inbox is anything other than personal email.
Actually, what you described is a rather inaccurate representation of Mormon belief. Celestial brides need not be plural, and women become godesses, not gods. Since God created worlds without number, we can expect that those who receive the fullness of his glory will do the same.
As fun as it is, you might want to get all your Mormon information from sources that aren't anti-Mormon. If you had accurate information about thsoe beliefs, you might find it's not as nonsensical as you thought.
The distributor in the described system is providing value by listening to a song and deciding it's worth distributing. Musicians promoting their own music don't get very far if they are the only ones doing that promoting. This is one of the services that publishers of music (although it works the same for book publishers) provide -- filtering out stuff that's not very good.
A new artist needs to get their music listened to by more people more than they need total ownership of their music. 100% of nothing is still nothing. 50% of something is more than nothing. And someone looking for new music to listen to needs someone who can point them in a useful direction.
I think the described system has some definite merits, frankly.
The "plastics" line was also a reference to the movie "It's a Wonderful Life," from the scene where George and Mary are sharing the phone while talking to "Hee-Haw" Sam Wainwright (who not incidentally got rather rich on his plastics, while George was stuck at the Building and Loan).
/me will spew trivia for food.
Another perhaps little known reference to that film were the Sesame Street characters named after Bert the cop and Ernie the cab-driver.
Most likely, the fares on the website weren't fares that they could give you -- to get those fares, you have to use the website.
The airlines I know of do not give any kind of bonus or commission to the res agents based on their sales -- they're straight wage, with little spiffs for things like credit-card or rental-car referrals.
As I mentioned, if you have some flexibility on your schedule, you can save money. Also, prices really can change multiple times a day, and cheaper seats can be sold out from under you if you wait.
Well, not all airlines are going broke, although everybody's having a hard time staying solvent right now. The additional security the past few years has made the price of flying higher for passengers in terms of time and money and hassle, so fewer people are flying. Also, fuel prices have been higher, adding further to the costs of operation.
But I don't know what you mean by "those that aren't using it." AFAIK, the only airline that has significantly different prices for the same class of seat in the same markets is Southwest, and I don't know that they aren't using the same basic pricing structure with different numbers. If you can give some details of what you're referring to, maybe somebody can give a more clear response.
Having a well honed pricing structure will tend to maximize profits, but can't possibly guarantee that that maximum will even be a positive number.
Actually, the airline pricing system is one of the best honed out there. It enables airlines to sell more really cheap fares, to have seats available up to the last minute for people who absolutely positively have to have one on no real notice, against competitors who can (and do) change prices on competing products multiple times a day, all while keep the airline roughly solvent.
This is not a simple thing to do.
For those who are interested in getting the best deals, some tips I've learned from my mother, the reservation agent:
And, because I know this is a frequent problem she runs into:
Hz, "ebg13."
Qb V trg n cevmr?
Legislators support their party's position (when there is one) most of the time for a very simple reason -- their positions are more likely to be reflected in law if they do.
Most folks don't understand some of the basic realities for a legislator. One of the most fundamental is that the most important vote in any legislative session is the first one -- for the leader of the house. The party with the majority selects the leader, who selects the chairs of the committees (in the Congress, the selection of chairs is a bit more complicated than that, but the chair will always be in the majority party). The chairs, in turn, determine which bills will ever have a prayer of going forward. This is why the idea that "party doesn't matter" may work in selecting the candidate you're going to vote for, but is silly in considering what that candidate will do once they are elected -- because the first thing they will do (if they are legislative candidates) is vote for their party's leadership, and everything they do will be impacted based on whether or not the person they voted for won.
Another reality is that legislators routinely do not read the bills they vote on, because there simply isn't time for each of them to read every bill that comes by -- some individual bills are thicker than those huge Linux manuals, and they're not quite as easy to read. Since there isn't time to read them all, they have to rely on others who have more expertise to help them know which bills they want to support, which they want to kill, and which they want to amend. On party bills, that's pretty easy -- they will follow the leadership of their party unless they've got a good reason not to. Most bills, though, aren't party bills, and, in those cases, they will probably rely on lobbyists that have expertise on that issue. The lobbyists may have actually written the legislation, and can bring up the important things to pay attention to.
Another is ignoring the fact that virtually every communication from a constituent can be handled by the following basic letter:
With this issue, you might get a paragraph sorta like this:
Political parties are a useful construction -- they provide a loose umbrella under which those with similar interests can work together to further their common interests. The people in those parties -- without exception -- are imperfect, and some are dishonest or even criminal. This doesn't invalidate the parties, nor the party system. Party remains a useful way of knowing basically where a candidate is coming from in terms of philosophy and positions -- if they differ from their party's basic positions, they'll show that sooner or later.
Party is not a useful way of knowing how much character someone has. If you haven't found political folks who you like but don't agree with and people you agree with but don't like, you haven't been paying enough attention. Both exist, no matter what your positions or tastes.
So I am not one who finds any particular virtue in the notion of being an "independent." I don't find any particular virtue in being in any given party either, except for this: politics is team sport, and the parties are the teams. Joining a party is joining a team and getting into the game. Small groups of individuals can be ideologically pure, but, in any kind of democracy, they ought not have
Wait for sending out messages to random Congressfolk until the bill is submitted and has a number. If you contact your Senators or Rep to support a bill without a number, it's not going to reflect well on your position unless you have a relationship with them to begin with or know that they're so into the issue that they might sign on to cosponsor.
Hitting Sen. Brownback's website, there's no mention of this bill at all. My guess is that we're ahead of the curve on this. The work to do now is going to be more along the lines of organizing the effort to work this bill. It's going to take time and commitment (not to mention attention span). If the bill's not submitted yet, selected calls to the right senators can help collect cosponsors. After it's been submitted, it's a good idea to contact the committee staff and committee members of the appropriate committee (especially if they're from your state) to encourage their support in scheduling the bill for a hearing and their vote to report it out of committee. This process is slow and long (review "I'm Just a Bill" from Schoolhouse Rock for a brief reminder).
It is good to contact Congressfolk to tell them what you want them to do. It's very good to be polite, succinct, and thoughtful in your presentation. It's very important to have the right message at the right time -- they get so much mail and email and phone comments every day that asking for their support for something that won't need their attention for months (or years) can seem to them an annoying waste of time.
Contacting Sen. Brownback's staff to thank them for this bill is a very good idea, especially for Kansans. Asking how you could help would also be a good idea.
Take care,
Blain
Enough with the Hindenberg, already. The Hindenberg didn't burn like it did because of the hydrogen in it -- it was because the varnish they used was the same chemical compound as rocket fuel -- oxidizer built in.
If you watch the footage, you can see the whispy hydrogen flames going upward, while the heavy flames on the outside shell burn hot enough to distort the metal. The hydrogen didn't have enough air mixed in to really burn well or explode.
Ah. So you've noticed that guy on the third floor too? Good. I thought it was just me! I was kinda thinking terrorist, but he could be a file trader too.
Now, do the voices talk to you too, or is that really just me?
- Because Portland didn't do it. If you want to do it, get to work, and you can do it too.
Why Bellingham?- Because Bellingham's already been doing it.
- Because Bellingham is cooler than Portland.
- Because the Cocoanut Grove is within walking distance from BTC (Portland can not say the same thing, btw).
- Because Bellingham is much closer to Illiad.
- Because Bellingham is much cooler than Tacoma (and safer if you're not packing heat). It even smells better since they closed the toxic waste incinerator.
What has Bellngham got?- Fairhaven
- Red Square
- the site of the gas pipeline rupture/explosion
- a view of Lummi Island
- The World Famous Up and Up
-
Rumors
- Railroad Avenue
- Bellweather on the Bay
- The Parkade
- Casa Que Pasa (home of the potato burrito)
- Ski to Sea
- the Peace Vigil
- George "Pinky" Nelson
- a view of Mt. Baker
- Boulevard Park
- Samish Drive-in
- GP
- Mark Asmundson
- the most exciting radio talk north of Sedro-Wooley
- Sudden Valley
- Chuckanut Drive
- Bellis Fair
- REI
- The Bagelry
- the Storm
- the (no longer red) Raiders
- the Mariners
- the Horseshoe Cafe
- Bucks/BBBC/3Bs/Whatever they call it now
- Stanellos
I suppose you could make a list as long or interesting about Portland or Tacoma, and I could make one about Sedro-Woolley or Ferndale if you wanted. If those places want to do as much work and make this happen, I think that'd be okay too. In this case, they haven't yet.Racism is much less of a problem in the US than in most of the world. And religious persecution here now is pretty mild level stuff -- we don't have mobs burning houses, beating people and raping women here all that often anymore. Both still exist, and neither is at an acceptable level (since there is no acceptable level IMO).
Tribalism remains a problem of all humanity -- we view people we consider of our "tribe" to be different from and better than those who aren't, for no particular reason other than, on whatever basis we define our "tribe," they are like "us." In the US, those tribal lines remain mostly informal, and are less likely to be drawn on a strictly racial or religious line than in other places. But you can still find it unsafe to be found in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin color, wearing the wrong clothes, or simply not being recognized by anybody.
Terrorists not only have a strong sense of "tribe," they also have a strong belief that hideous and unacceptable treatment of people from other tribes is acceptable and even commendable. Fundamentalism can play along with tribalism and make things particularly ugly.
Please note that I'm not saying that fundamentalism and tribalism make terrorism -- that's taking my points way too far. They play roles in supporting terrorism, but they don't take anybody's choice to not engage in terrorist acts away.
Steve Forbes as wacko? Sure. Good idea. Take one of the the loudest voice in the media supporting your point of view and call him a name. That's the way to get some action around here -- stick with the people you're comfortable with and agree with on everything.
All four of them.
That's the way to change things in any kind of democracy -- make for a majority of four.
There's no reason to think that the Eldred Act is going to be a partisan bill -- making it so, and alienating the majority party in both houses would be rather stupid. You're already facing the opposition of the Senate Committee chair, who's very much opposed to the idea, so why pile on enemies to your bill just because you don't like them?
Do you want to accomplish something, or do you want to feel good about every detail of it?
Better idea -- take your friends where you can find them, and let them work for your side whenever you can. I've never found anybody I disliked enough that I would refuse to have them support my candidate or bill. And the folks in this fight just don't have the political clout to be rejecting any friendly offers from people with the money, following and audience of Steve Forbes.
Not if you want to see this happen.
The recent /. discussion of worms exploiting weak passwords got me thinking problems I have with consistently using strong passwords. I have heard many times that we should use strong passwords (mixed case, letters, symbols, no dictionary words in any language, no number patterns that others could derive, etc.), that we should not reuse passwords, that we should not write down passwords, but should always have them memorized.
Now, if I was on a handful of systems, this would make sense. However, I've found that many websites I come to are increasingly requiring registration, including creating a userid and password to log in to their systems. The personalization of my interface with their system is nice, but makes following the rules about passwords unmanageable -- I can't keep track of several dozen strong passwords from memory.
As an alternative to that, for website uses such as I've mentioned, it seems to me that making use of a public-key encryption system, something along the lines of what I understand SSL to do, would seem to make more sense. My system could exchange encrypted data with the web server using our known public keys, enabling us each to know that we are, in fact, who we claim to be. Even if I was required to use my pass-phrase that goes with that public key each time I logged in, it would be easier for me to remember that one pass-phrase (which could be even more secure than a 6-8 character password) than is currently available.
Obviously there would be change-over costs involved with this, but is there some big reason that this kind of a system would be less secure than the current system, particularly if we take into account the problem of weak and repeatedly used passwords?